People with disabilities are disproportionately represented among the poorest of the poor in developing countries. An increasingly common method of combating poverty in developing countries, microlending, has been largely unavailable to those with disabilities. This paper reports on one of the...

This working paper compares teacher/student links that have undergone a roster confirmation process—whereby teachers verify the subjects and students they taught—to teacher/student links from unconfirmed administrative data. Due to the departmentalization of instruction in math and...

Ideally, nonexperimental methods that aim to replicate the results of rigorous randomized experiments focus on the intent to treat (ITT) experimental impact estimate, the most causally rigorous measure. This working paper develops a new replication approach that facilitates testing...

Nonexperimental methods, such as regression modeling or statistical matching, produce unbiased estimates if the underlying assumptions hold, but these assumptions are usually not testable. Most studies testing nonexperimental designs find that they fail to produce unbiased estimates, but these...

Helping students formulate career goals and prepare for successful careers continues to be an important educational objective pursued by many high schools. This report examines the challenges faced by a recent cohort of high school students as they sought to define and achieve their goals, the...

This paper investigates the extent to which variables describing the classroom behavior of teachers and variables describing teachers' backgrounds and training explain differences in the effectiveness of teachers in improving the vocabulary skills of inner-city black children in four elementary...

Some educators are concerned that students with test scores at the bottom or top of the test score distribution will negatively affect the value-added estimates of teachers of those students.

Examines work-based learning activities in high school, noting that a diverse mix of students—including both high- and low-achievers—participates in some work-based activity. However, females are more likely to do so than males. Also notes that internships arranged through school...

This article addresses likely error rates for measuring teacher and school performance in the upper elementary grades using value-added models applied to student test score gain data. Using formulas based on ordinary least squares and empirical Bayes estimators, error rates for comparing a...