We focus on how standardized testing in American education has reflected, reproduced, and
transformed social inequalities. We begin by describing inequalities in test score …

Teachers make a difference in student academic growth. Students from low-income, minority
communities attend schools with less resources and less qualified teachers than students in …

Teacher evaluation systems are being overhauled by states and districts across the United
States. And, while intentions are admirable, the result for many new systems is that good …

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores (“value-added”) a good measure of their
quality? This question has sparked debate largely because of disagreement about (1) …

Applied researchers often find themselves making statistical inferences in settings that
would seem to require multiple comparisons adjustments. We challenge the Type I error …

More than one out of every five principals leaves their school each year. In some cases,
these career changes are driven by the choices of district leadership. In other cases …

We used a random-assignment experiment in Los Angeles Unified School District to
evaluate various non-experimental methods for estimating teacher effects on student test …

For estimating causal effects of treatments, randomized experiments are generally
considered the gold standard. Nevertheless, they are often infeasible to conduct for a variety …

Over the past four decades, empirical researchers—many of them economists—have
accumulated an impressive amount of evidence on teachers. In this paper, we ask what the …

The literature on effective schools emphasizes the importance of a quality teaching force in
improving educational outcomes for students. In this article we use value-added methods to …