This article discusses the trade-offs associated with study designs that involve random assignment of students within schools and describes the experience from one such study of Teach For America (TFA). The article concludes that within-school random assignment studies such as the TFA evaluation...

This study tracked a subset of Florida's 2000–2001 and 2001–2002 high school seniors who took a college algebra placement test. Students who passed the test (with a score very near the cut-off for eligibility) and enrolled in a rigorous dual enrollment college algebra class were 16 percent...

This working paper investigates how empirical Bayes shrinkage, an approach commonly used in implementing teacher accountability systems, affects the value-added estimates of teachers of students with hard-to-predict achievement levels, such as students who have low prior achievement and receive...

This working paper uses urban school district data to investigate whether including track indicators or accounting for classroom characteristics in the value-added model is sufficient to eliminate potential bias resulting from the sorting of students into academic tracks. Accounting for two...

This working paper uses urban school district data to investigate whether including track indicators or accounting for classroom characteristics in the value-added model is sufficient to eliminate potential bias resulting from the sorting of students into academic tracks. Accounting for two...

This working paper investigates how empirical Bayes shrinkage, an approach commonly used in implementing teacher accountability systems, affects the value-added estimates of teachers of students with hard-to-predict achievement levels, such as students who have low prior achievement and receive...

This paper estimates the impact of college teaching on students' academic achievement and labor market outcomes using administrative data from Bocconi University (Italy) matched with Italian tax records. The estimation exploits the random allocation of students to teachers in a fixed sequence of...

This paper analyzes gender bias in teaching in low-performing schools in Chile. To carry out the analyses, the authors used videotaped classes for fourth graders and coded 237 tapings. Results show a general (although not uniform) bias in teachers' actions that resulted in less attention to...