Reports initial findings from a synthesis and reanalysis of all available evidence on whether quasi-experimental evaluation designs produced unbiased estimates of the impacts of education, training, and welfare programs. This methodological paper tries to understand conditions under which...

Do alternatively certified teachers produce student achievement gains on par with other teachers? This study used propensity score matching to identify a comparison group of teachers in Florida to address this question for the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE). Using...

The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), a whole-school intervention that aims to improve schools by raising teacher quality, provides teachers with opportunities for professional growth, promotion to school leadership roles without leaving the classroom, structured feedback, and performance-based...

Comprehensive teacher induction provides novice teachers with carefully selected and trained full-time mentors, as well as a curriculum of intensive and structured support. This report presents the first round of results from a large-scale randomized controlled study of the effects of two...

This paper clarifies four areas of confusion about value-added methodology and its role in teacher evaluation: (1) use of value-added information; (2) consequences for teachers versus those for students of classifying and misclassifying teachers as effective or ineffective; (3) reliability of...

Teacher induction programs are designed to support new teachers and reduce teacher turnover. Comprehensive teacher induction, however, goes beyond traditional induction by relying on carefully selected and trained full-time mentors and also includes an intensive curriculum involving...

Students of Teach For America teachers outscored their schoolmates on math achievement tests, and matched their average performance in reading, according to the findings from the first national evaluation of the impact of TFA teachers on student learning. The large-scale random assignment study,...

This four-page issue brief summarizes findings from Mathematica's evaluation of Teach For America. The researchers found that TFA teachers outperformed non-TFA teachers in the same schools in math and achieved the same results in reading. However, TFA teachers also reported greater challenges in...