In this article, I examine the current policy of full inclusion of children receiving special education services in regular education classrooms. Specifically, I focus on the policy's effects on the classmates of children with special needs, with a particular focus on classmates of students with...

The expansion of charter schools--publicly funded, yet in direct competition with traditional public schools--has emerged as a favored response to poor performance in the education sector. While a large and growing literature has sought to estimate the impact of these schools on student...

Nonrandom assignment of students to teachers can bias value-added estimates of teachers' causal effects. Rothstein (2008, 2010) shows that typical value-added models indicate large counterfactual effects of fifth-grade teachers on students' fourth-grade learning, indicating that classroom...

Reorganizing primary school grade spans is a tractable and relatively inexpensive school reform. However, assessing the effects of reorganization requires also examining other organizational changes that may accompany grade span reforms. Using data on New York City public schools from 1996 to...

This article seeks to move the adequacy issue forward by demonstrating that under a certain set of assumptions, it is possible to provide a set of programmatic offerings that corresponds well with what we consider to be an emerging, research-based consensus about what constitutes best practices....

The Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study testing the hypothesis that rewarding teachers for improved student scores on standardized tests would cause scores to rise. Results, as described in Springer et al. (2010b), did not confirm this hypothesis. In this article we...

This study examines how aspects of a district's institutional and policy environment influence the distribution of teacher salary increases. The primary hypothesis tested is that statewide performance-based accountability policies influence the extent to which districts backload teacher salary...

Value-added measures of teacher quality may be sensitive to the quantitative properties of the student tests upon which they are based. This article focuses on the sensitivity of value added to test score ceiling effects. Test score ceilings are increasingly common in testing instruments across...

Investment in the certification of teachers by the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) represents a significant policy initiative for the nation's public school teachers. This article investigates the potential impact of NBPTS certification on teachers' career paths. Using...

A number of high schools across the United States have moved to later bell times on the belief that their previous bell times were too early for the “biological clocks” of adolescents. In this article I study whether doing so improves academic performance. I first focus on the Twin Cities...