The typical measure used by researchers and school administrators to evaluate teachers is based on how the students' achievement increases after being exposed to the teacher, or based on the teacher's "value-added''. When teacher value-added is heterogeneous across her students, the typically...

This paper investigates how the precision and stability of a teacher's value-added estimate relates to the characteristics of the teacher's students. Using a large administrative data set and a variety of teacher value-added estimators, it finds that the stability over time of teacher...

We study the properties of two specification tests that have been applied to a variety of estimators in the context of value-added measures (VAMs) of teacher and school quality: the Hausman test for choosing between random and fixed effects and a test for feedback (sometimes called a...

School districts and state departments of education frequently must choose between a variety of methods to estimating teacher quality. This paper examines under what circumstances the decision between estimators of teacher quality is important. We examine estimates derived from growth percentile...

This paper examines attrition and retention rates among teachers in charter and traditional public schools. This study finds that among all teachers, there is no difference in the attrition rate between charter and traditional public school teachers. Among new teachers, charter teachers are 3.39...

Compensation of most US public school teachers is rigid and solely based on seniority. This paper studies a 2011 reform that gave school districts in Wisconsin full autonomy to redesign teacher pay schemes. I show that, following the reform, some districts switched to flexible compensation and...

We investigate whether commonly used value-added estimation strategies can produce accurate estimates of teacher effects. We estimate teacher effects in simulated student achievement data sets that mimic plausible types of student grouping and teacher assignment scenarios. No one method...

We examine earnings records for 90,000 classroom teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001–02 and 2006–07 school years, roughly 20,000 of whom left teaching during that time. Among grade 4–8 teachers leaving for other industries, a 1 standard deviation increase in...

Although performance measurement systems are likely to have significant recruitment and retention consequences these have received much less attention that the individual incentive effects. This paper explores these recruitment and retention consequences in organizations, such as those in the...