Dan Goldhaber
Biographic Data
| ID | 267281 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dan Goldhaber |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dan |
| FAMILY NAME | Goldhaber |
| SIGNATURE | GOLDHABER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | American Institutes for Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4260-4040 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 68 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 397 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Impacts of Academic Recovery Interventions on Student Achievement in 2022 to 2023
The COVID-19 pandemic caused large, persistent declines in student achievement. This paper examines 2022–2023 recovery efforts across eight districts, including tutoring, small-group instruction, after-school, extended year, double-dose, digital learning, and expert teacher interventions. The study includes 12 math programs and 15 literacy programs (three covered both subjects). Most served fewer students and provided lower dosage than planned. U…
Clinical Experiences and (Unexpected Findings on) Job Placements: Experimental Evidence From Student Teaching Interventions
We implemented two reforms to student teaching in randomized controlled trials designed to test improvements to preservice preparation. Although neither reform affected overall teacher employment, we find significant effects on other labor market outcomes. The first-placed student teachers are planned with more effective mentors and in more effective schools for their clinical experiences. We find that treated candidates tended to find employment…
Postpandemic Teacher Supply and Demand
Teacher staffing challenges were pervasive throughout the pandemic, but the downturn in student enrollment combined with the end of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds leaves considerable uncertainty about the postpandemic teacher labor market. We use data on new teacher endorsements and job postings scraped from district hiring websites in Washington to measure postpandemic supply and demand for teachers both overall and by su…
State differences in pathways to school leadership and in achievement growth
Measuring the Quality of the Teacher Workforce
Researchers from the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research examine two approaches to measuring teacher effectiveness: traditional value-added measures (VAMs) based on test scores and newer measures focusing on non-test outcomes like attendance and behavior. Analysis of data from 8,000 Massachusetts teachers reveals three key findings: teachers vary significantly in their effectivene…
Misalignments Between Student Teaching Placements and Initial Teaching Positions: Implications for the Early-Career Attrition of Special Education Teachers
Graduates of special education teacher education programs can teach in a range of special education settings, raising the potential that their training can occur in very different settings than where they find their first jobs. We follow 263 completers of Moderate Disabilities programs in the U.S. state of Massachusetts from their field placements to their early-career teaching positions and study the characteristics of their field placements and…
School District Job Postings and Staffing Challenges Throughout the Second School Year During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Purpose: In this paper we investigate school district staffing challenges during the 2021–22 school year, the second school year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research Methods/Approach: We use novel data from Washington state collected by scraping websites for job postings during the 2021–22 school year; the districts represented in the study serve more than 98% of students in the state. We analyze these data using descriptive and regression analyses…
Summer School as a Learning Loss Recovery Strategy After Covid-19: Evidence from Summer 2022
To make up for pandemic-related learning losses, many U.S. public school districts have increased enrollment in their summer school programs. We assessed summer school as a strategy for COVID-19 learning recovery by tracking the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts serving 400,000 students. Using value-added models that control for students’ demographics and prior achievement, we estimated a posi…
Leveling Up: An Academic Acceleration Policy to Increase Equity in Advanced High School Course Taking
Taking advanced courses in high school predicts many positive outcomes, yet low-income students and students who identify as Black and Hispanic are underrepresented. Policies such as “algebra for all” that accelerate middle school students into advanced courses are well-studied, but little is known about newer academic acceleration policies that target older students. Between 2014–2015 and 2016–2017, 72 districts in Washington implemented Academi…
Assessing the Predictive Validity of the Massachusetts Candidate Assessment of Performance
We evaluate the predictive validity of the Massachusetts Candidate Assessment of Performance (CAP), a practice-based assessment of teaching skills that is now a requirement for teacher preparation program completion in Massachusetts. We find that candidates’ performance on the CAP significantly predicts their in-service summative performance evaluations in their first 2 years in the teaching workforce, but it is not predictive of their value adde…
Four years of pandemic-era emergency licenses: Retention and effectiveness of emergency-licensed Massachusetts teachers over time
Gender, Ethnoracial, and Economic Differences in the Predictive Power of Early-Grade Test Scores on College Enrollment and Degree Completion
Attempts to explain gender differences in postsecondary enrollment and completion have focused almost exclusively on students’ academic performance and experiences in middle school and high school. Our analysis shows that elementary-grade test scores are also an early indicator of postsecondary outcomes. We examine the relationship between third-grade test performance and students’ college outcomes, focusing on variations by gender, race/ethnicit…
Course grades as a signal of student achievement: Evidence of grade inflation before and after Covid‐19
There is widespread speculation and some evidence that grades and grading standards changed during the pandemic, making higher grades relatively easier to achieve. In this paper we use longitudinal data from students in Washington State to investigate middle and high school grades in math, science, and English pre‐ and post‐pandemic. Our descriptive analysis of the data reveals that—in accordance with state guidance—almost no students received an…
The Long and Winding Road: Mapping the College and Employment Pathways to Teacher Education Program Completion in Washington State
Nationally, more than 75% of individuals who are credentialed to teach are prepared in traditional college- or university-based teacher education programs (TEPs). But the college and employment pathways that prospective teachers take to TEP enrollment and completion have not been comprehensively examined. A better understanding of how credentialed individuals find their way into TEPs helps us understand the sources of new teacher supply early in …
Attention to Equity in Teacher Education Admissions Processes
This study investigated the underexplored topic of teacher preparation program admissions processes by interviewing faculty and analyzing program documents. We investigated how 31 K-12 mathematics and science teacher preparation programs (MSTPPs) and faculty attend to diversity, equity, inclusion, and social and racial justice (DEIJ). Specific foci included applicant recruitment and selection, components of applications (e.g., forms, essays, and …
Evidence on the Relationship between Pension-Driven Financial Incentives and Late-Career Attrition: Implications for Pension Reform
Retirement plans can create strong financial incentives that have important labor market implications, and many states have adopted alternative plan designs that significantly change these incentives. The authors use longitudinal data to investigate the impact of Washington State's 1996 introduction of a hybrid retirement plan on late-career attrition. The unique setup of Washington's plans allows them to provide empirical evidence on the influen…
How Much Do Teachers Value Compensation Deferred for Retirement? Evidence From Defined Contribution Rate Choices
How much do teachers value compensation deferred for retirement (CDR)? This question is important because the vast majority of public school teachers are covered by defined benefit pension plans that “backload” a large share of compensation to retirement relative to the compensation structure in the private sector, and there is scant evidence about whether pension structures are consistent with teacher preferences for current compensation versus …
Assessing Licensure Test Performance and Predictive Validity for Different Teacher Subgroups
We investigate the predictive validity of teacher licensure tests using data from the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure (MTEL). MTEL scores predict teachers’ in-service performance ratings and contributions to student test scores (i.e., value added). We then explore whether these relationships vary for teacher candidates of color. Although candidates of color have lower first-time pass rates and are less likely to retake licensure tests,…
How did it get this way? Disentangling the sources of teacher quality gaps through agent-based modeling
To What Extent Does In‐person Schooling Contribute to the Spread of Covid‐19? Evidence From Michigan and Washington
In this paper we use data from Michigan and Washington on COVID case rates at the county level linked to information on the instructional modality offered by local public school districts during the 2020/2021 school year to assess the relationship between modality and COVID spread. We focus primarily on COVID case rates, but also provide estimates for hospitalizations (in Washington only) and deaths. District and month fixed effects models that e…
Sometimes Less, Sometimes More: Trends in Career and Technical Education Participation for Students With Disabilities
We leverage nationally representative data and statewide data from Washington to investigate trends in occupational career and technical education (CTE) participation for students with and without disabilities. Consistent with prior work, we document declines in occupational CTE participation since the early 2000s, but we provide the first evidence that this decline can be explained by movement out of courses that are no longer considered CTE. Un…
Teacher Attrition and Mobility Over Time
We use 35 years of data on public school teachers in Washington to calculate several different measures of teacher attrition and mobility. We explore how these rates vary over time and their relationship with the state unemployment rate. Annual rates of teacher attrition from the workforce have been between 5% and 8% for each of the past 35 years, and there is a strong negative relationship between unemployment rates and these rates of attrition.…
Lost to the System? A Descriptive Exploration of Teacher Candidates’ Career Paths
We use data on over 14,000 teacher candidates in Washington state, merged with employment data from the state’s public schools and Unemployment Insurance system, to investigate the career paths of recently certified teacher candidates in the state. About two thirds of these candidates are observed as public school teachers at some point within 5 years after completing student teaching, many of whom transition from nonteaching education positions …
Room for Improvement? Mentor Teachers and the Evolution of Teacher Preservice Clinical Evaluations
The clinical teaching experience is one of the most important components of teacher preparation. Prior observational research has found that more effective mentors and schools with better professional climates are associated with better preparation for teacher candidates. We test these findings using an experimental assignment of teacher candidates to placement sites in two states. Candidates who were randomly assigned to higher quality placement…
Public School Teacher Contracts and State-Level Reforms: Assessing Changes to Collective Bargaining Restrictiveness Across Three States
In many school districts, the policies that regulate teaching personnel are governed by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). While there is significant policy attention that has affected the scope of these agreements, there is relatively little research on how CBAs vary over time, or whether they change in response to states’ legislative reforms. Using a panel data set of over 1,200 CBAs across three states, we compare CBA change before and a…
Uneven Playing Field? Assessing the Teacher Quality Gap Between Advantaged and Disadvantaged Students
Policymakers aiming to close the well-documented achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students have increasingly turned their attention to issues of teacher quality. A number of studies have demonstrated that teachers are inequitably distributed across student subgroups by input measures, like experience and qualifications, as well as output measures, like value-added estimates of teacher performance, but these tend to focus on ei…
Teacher career paths, teacher quality, and persistence in the classroom: Are public schools keeping their best
In this paper we examine the mobility of early‐career teachers of varying quality, measured using value‐added estimates of teacher performance. Unlike previous studies that have examined these issues, we focus on the variation in these effects across the effectiveness distribution. We find that, on average, more effective teachers tend to stay in their initial schools and in the teaching profession. But there also appears to be heterogeneity in m…
School Choice: An Examination of the Empirical Evidence on Achievement, Parental Decision Making, and Equity
Support for all forms of school choice—public school choice, charter schools, and public-private choice—has been growing in recent years. Arguments in favor of greater choice rest on two propositions: that choice would serve to give more control over educational decisions to parents who in turn would choose good schools for their children, and that competition between schools for students will help reduce inefficiencies in the delivery of educati…
Building a More Complete Understanding of Teacher Evaluation Using Classroom Observations
Improving teacher evaluation is one of the most pressing but also contested areas of educational policy. Value-added measures have received much of the attention in new evaluation systems, but they can only be used to evaluate a fraction of teachers. Classroom observations are almost universally used to assess teachers, yet their statistical properties have received far less empirical scrutiny, in particular in consequential evaluation systems. I…
Race, Gender, and Teacher Testing: How Informative a Tool Is Teacher Licensure Testing
Virtually all states require teachers to undergo licensure testing before participation in the public school labor market. This article analyzes the information these tests provide about teacher effectiveness. The authors find that licensure tests have different predicative validity for student achievement by teacher race. They also find that student achievement is impacted by the race/ethnicity match between teachers and their students, with Bla…
Missing Elements in the Discussion of Teacher Shortages
Though policymakers are increasingly concerned about teacher shortages in U.S. public schools, the national discussion does not reflect historical patterns of the supply of and demand for newly minted teachers. Specifically, the production of teacher candidates has increased steadily since the mid-1980s, and only about half of graduating teacher candidates are hired as public school teachers in a typical year. That said, there is considerable evi…
Teacher Attrition and Mobility Over Time
We use 35 years of data on public school teachers in Washington to calculate several different measures of teacher attrition and mobility. We explore how these rates vary over time and their relationship with the state unemployment rate. Annual rates of teacher attrition from the workforce have been between 5% and 8% for each of the past 35 years, and there is a strong negative relationship between unemployment rates and these rates of attrition.…
Evaluating Prospective Teachers: Testing the Predictive Validity of the edTPA
We use longitudinal data from Washington State to provide estimates of the extent to which performance on the edTPA, a performance-based, subject-specific assessment of teacher candidates, is predictive of the likelihood of employment in the teacher workforce and value-added measures of teacher effectiveness. While edTPA scores are highly predictive of employment in the state's public teaching workforce, evidence on the relationship between edTPA…
Has It Always Been This Way? Tracing the Evolution of Teacher Quality Gaps in U.S. Public Schools
There is mounting evidence of substantial “teacher quality gaps” (TQGs) between advantaged and disadvantaged students but practically no empirical evidence about their history. We use longitudinal data on public school students, teachers, and schools from two states—North Carolina and Washington—to provide a descriptive history of the evolution of TQGs in these states. We find that TQGs exist in every year in each state, and for all measures, we …
Exploring the Potential of Value-Added Performance Measures to Affect the Quality of the Teacher Workforce
The past decade has seen a tremendous amount of research on the use of value-added modeling to assess individual teachers, and a significant number of states and districts are now using, or plan to use, value added as a component of a teacher’s summative performance evaluation. In this article, I explore the various mechanisms through which the use of value added might affect teacher quality and describe what we know empirically about the potenti…
Is it Just a Bad Class? Assessing the Long‐term Stability of Estimated Teacher Performance
A number of teacher workforce policies implicitly assume that job performance is a relatively stable attribute within teachers. We use longitudinal data on 5th grade teachers in North Carolina to assess this using value‐added measures ( VAM s) of job performance. We find that there is a permanent component of teacher performance that is stable in teachers over long periods—implying that workforce policies selecting teachers based on VAM s could e…
Evidence-Based Teacher Preparation: Policy Context and What We Know
Teacher preparation programs (TPPs) have received a great deal of policy and research attention of late. And despite the commonsense notion that preparation for formal classroom responsibilities should improve the readiness of teacher candidates, the value of formalized preservice teacher education is unclear. In this review of the quantitative evidence about TPPs, I find that most studies show only minor differences in the value added of teacher…
Excavating the Teacher Pipeline: Teacher Preparation Programs and Teacher Attrition
We analyze the placement and attrition patterns of teachers by preparation programs and document large differences in the rate at which teachers exit both their schools and the profession. These differences are robust to within-school comparisons. Moreover, assumptions about turnover and the persistence of program effects prove important for predicting the likely changes in student achievement that would result from varying the proportion of grad…
The relation between children's health and academic achievement
Does the Match Matter? Exploring Whether Student Teaching Experiences Affect Teacher Effectiveness
We use data from six Washington State teacher education programs to investigate the relationship between teacher candidates’ student teaching experiences and their later teaching effectiveness. Our primary finding is that teachers are more effective when the student demographics of their current school are similar to the student demographics of the school in which they did their student teaching. While descriptive, this suggests that the school c…
School Choice: Do We Know Enough
Room for Improvement? Mentor Teachers and the Evolution of Teacher Preservice Clinical Evaluations
The clinical teaching experience is one of the most important components of teacher preparation. Prior observational research has found that more effective mentors and schools with better professional climates are associated with better preparation for teacher candidates. We test these findings using an experimental assignment of teacher candidates to placement sites in two states. Candidates who were randomly assigned to higher quality placement…
Student Teaching and the Geography of Teacher Shortages
We use a unique dataset of student teaching placements in the State of Washington and a proxy for teacher shortages, the proportion of new teacher hires in a school or district with emergency teaching credentials, to provide the first empirical evidence of a relationship between student teaching placements and teacher shortages. We find that schools and districts that host fewer student teachers or are nearby to districts that host fewer student …
Inconvenient Truth? Do Collective Bargaining Agreements Help Explain the Mobility of Teachers within School Districts
We utilize detailed teacher‐level longitudinal data from Washington State to investigate patterns of teacher mobility in districts with different collective bargaining agreement (CBA) transfer provisions. Specifically, we estimate the log odds that teachers of varying experience and effectiveness levels transfer out of their schools to other schools in the district in Washington kindergarten through 12th grade (K‐12) public schools. We find littl…
Crossing the Border? Exploring the Cross-State Mobility of the Teacher Workforce
Due to data limitations, very little is known about patterns of cross-state teacher mobility. It is an important issue because barriers to cross-state mobility create labor market frictions that could lead both current and prospective teachers to opt out of the teaching profession. In this article, we match state-level administrative data sets from Oregon and Washington and present evidence on patterns of in-service teacher mobility between these…
Lost to the System? A Descriptive Exploration of Teacher Candidates’ Career Paths
We use data on over 14,000 teacher candidates in Washington state, merged with employment data from the state’s public schools and Unemployment Insurance system, to investigate the career paths of recently certified teacher candidates in the state. About two thirds of these candidates are observed as public school teachers at some point within 5 years after completing student teaching, many of whom transition from nonteaching education positions …
Front End to Back End: Teacher Preparation, Workforce Entry, and Attrition
We use a database of over 15,000 teacher candidates from 15 teacher education programs in Washington state to investigate the connections between specific teacher preparation experiences and the likelihood that these candidates enter and stay in the state's public teaching workforce. As has been found in prior research, candidates with endorsements in hard-to-staff subjects like math and special education are more likely to enter the public teach…
Public School Teacher Contracts and State-Level Reforms: Assessing Changes to Collective Bargaining Restrictiveness Across Three States
In many school districts, the policies that regulate teaching personnel are governed by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). While there is significant policy attention that has affected the scope of these agreements, there is relatively little research on how CBAs vary over time, or whether they change in response to states’ legislative reforms. Using a panel data set of over 1,200 CBAs across three states, we compare CBA change before and a…
Benefit or Burden? On the Intergenerational Inequity of Teacher Pension Plans
Most public school teachers in the United States are enrolled in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Using administrative microdata from four states, combined with national pension funding data, we show these plans have accumulated substantial unfunded liabilities—effectively debt—owing to previous plan operations. On average across 49 state plans, an amount that exceeds 10% of current teachers’ earnings is being set aside to pay for previously a…
Teacher Collective Bargaining: Assessing the Internal Validity of Partial Independence Item Response Measures of Contract Restrictiveness
In 2010, Strunk and Reardon introduced a potentially transformative method for analyzing teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). We extend Strunk and Reardon's work by assessing whether the Partial Independence Item Response (PIIR) approach can be applied to subsets of provisions from CBAs, data that may be more feasible for researchers to collect. Utilizing a new data set derived from all provisions in all active CBAs in Washington stat…
The Economic Future of American Families: Income and Wealth Trends
Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream
Assessing Educational Practices: The Contribution of Economics
An Endogenous Model of Public School Expenditures and Private School Enrollment
School Choice: An Examination of the Empirical Evidence on Achievement, Parental Decision Making, and Equity
Support for all forms of school choice—public school choice, charter schools, and public-private choice—has been growing in recent years. Arguments in favor of greater choice rest on two propositions: that choice would serve to give more control over educational decisions to parents who in turn would choose good schools for their children, and that competition between schools for students will help reduce inefficiencies in the delivery of educati…
Does Teacher Certification Matter? High School Teacher Certification Status and Student Achievement
We empirically test how 12th-grade students of teachers with probationary certification, emergency certification, private school certification, or no certification in their subject area compare relative to students of teachers who have standard certification in their subject area. We also determine whether specific state-by-state differences in teacher licensure requirements systematically affect student achievement. In mathematics, we find teach…
School Choice: Do We Know Enough
Does Catholic High School Attendance Lead to Attendance at a More Selective College
Objectives. To evaluate whether Catholic high school attendance, relative to public high school attendance, affects the quality of four‐year college that students attend. Methods. We use quantile regression, which allows the relationship between Catholic high school attendance and college quality to vary along the conditional college quality distribution. Results. We find the relationship between Catholic high school attendance and college qualit…
Can Teacher Quality Be Effectively Assessed? National Board Certification as a Signal of Effective Teaching
In this paper, we describe the results of a study assessing the relationship between the certification of teachers by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and elementary-level student achievement. We examine whether NBPTS assesses the most effective applicants, whether certification by NBPTS serves as a signal of teacher quality, and whether completing the NBPTS assessment process serves as a catalyst for increasing teac…
Teacher career paths, teacher quality, and persistence in the classroom: Are public schools keeping their best
In this paper we examine the mobility of early‐career teachers of varying quality, measured using value‐added estimates of teacher performance. Unlike previous studies that have examined these issues, we focus on the variation in these effects across the effectiveness distribution. We find that, on average, more effective teachers tend to stay in their initial schools and in the teaching profession. But there also appears to be heterogeneity in m…
The relation between children's health and academic achievement
Race, Gender, and Teacher Testing: How Informative a Tool Is Teacher Licensure Testing
Virtually all states require teachers to undergo licensure testing before participation in the public school labor market. This article analyzes the information these tests provide about teacher effectiveness. The authors find that licensure tests have different predicative validity for student achievement by teacher race. They also find that student achievement is impacted by the race/ethnicity match between teachers and their students, with Bla…
Teacher Attitudes about Compensation Reform: Implications for Reform Implementation
Concerns about the quality of the teacher workforce and the distribution of teacher quality among schools have led to calls to reform teacher compensation. The authors present the results of the 2006 Washington State Teacher Compensation survey on teachers' attitudes about this issue. By linking survey results to detailed data on school and district characteristics, they analyze how teacher attitudes differ by individual characteristics such as s…
Is it Just a Bad Class? Assessing the Long‐term Stability of Estimated Teacher Performance
A number of teacher workforce policies implicitly assume that job performance is a relatively stable attribute within teachers. We use longitudinal data on 5th grade teachers in North Carolina to assess this using value‐added measures ( VAM s) of job performance. We find that there is a permanent component of teacher performance that is stable in teachers over long periods—implying that workforce policies selecting teachers based on VAM s could e…
Teacher Collective Bargaining: Assessing the Internal Validity of Partial Independence Item Response Measures of Contract Restrictiveness
In 2010, Strunk and Reardon introduced a potentially transformative method for analyzing teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). We extend Strunk and Reardon's work by assessing whether the Partial Independence Item Response (PIIR) approach can be applied to subsets of provisions from CBAs, data that may be more feasible for researchers to collect. Utilizing a new data set derived from all provisions in all active CBAs in Washington stat…
Excavating the Teacher Pipeline: Teacher Preparation Programs and Teacher Attrition
We analyze the placement and attrition patterns of teachers by preparation programs and document large differences in the rate at which teachers exit both their schools and the profession. These differences are robust to within-school comparisons. Moreover, assumptions about turnover and the persistence of program effects prove important for predicting the likely changes in student achievement that would result from varying the proportion of grad…
My End of the Bargain: Are There Cross-District Effects in Teacher Contract Provisions
A large literature on teacher collective bargaining describes the potential influence of the provisions in collectively bargained teacher union contracts on teachers and student achievement, but little is known about what influences the provisions that end up in these contracts. Using a unique data set made up of every active teacher collective bargaining agreement in Washington State, the authors estimate spatial lag models to explore the relati…
Crossing the Border? Exploring the Cross-State Mobility of the Teacher Workforce
Due to data limitations, very little is known about patterns of cross-state teacher mobility. It is an important issue because barriers to cross-state mobility create labor market frictions that could lead both current and prospective teachers to opt out of the teaching profession. In this article, we match state-level administrative data sets from Oregon and Washington and present evidence on patterns of in-service teacher mobility between these…
Exploring the Potential of Value-Added Performance Measures to Affect the Quality of the Teacher Workforce
The past decade has seen a tremendous amount of research on the use of value-added modeling to assess individual teachers, and a significant number of states and districts are now using, or plan to use, value added as a component of a teacher’s summative performance evaluation. In this article, I explore the various mechanisms through which the use of value added might affect teacher quality and describe what we know empirically about the potenti…
Uneven Playing Field? Assessing the Teacher Quality Gap Between Advantaged and Disadvantaged Students
Policymakers aiming to close the well-documented achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students have increasingly turned their attention to issues of teacher quality. A number of studies have demonstrated that teachers are inequitably distributed across student subgroups by input measures, like experience and qualifications, as well as output measures, like value-added estimates of teacher performance, but these tend to focus on ei…
Inconvenient Truth? Do Collective Bargaining Agreements Help Explain the Mobility of Teachers within School Districts
We utilize detailed teacher‐level longitudinal data from Washington State to investigate patterns of teacher mobility in districts with different collective bargaining agreement (CBA) transfer provisions. Specifically, we estimate the log odds that teachers of varying experience and effectiveness levels transfer out of their schools to other schools in the district in Washington kindergarten through 12th grade (K‐12) public schools. We find littl…
Building a More Complete Understanding of Teacher Evaluation Using Classroom Observations
Improving teacher evaluation is one of the most pressing but also contested areas of educational policy. Value-added measures have received much of the attention in new evaluation systems, but they can only be used to evaluate a fraction of teachers. Classroom observations are almost universally used to assess teachers, yet their statistical properties have received far less empirical scrutiny, in particular in consequential evaluation systems. I…
Missing Elements in the Discussion of Teacher Shortages
Though policymakers are increasingly concerned about teacher shortages in U.S. public schools, the national discussion does not reflect historical patterns of the supply of and demand for newly minted teachers. Specifically, the production of teacher candidates has increased steadily since the mid-1980s, and only about half of graduating teacher candidates are hired as public school teachers in a typical year. That said, there is considerable evi…
Benefit or Burden? On the Intergenerational Inequity of Teacher Pension Plans
Most public school teachers in the United States are enrolled in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Using administrative microdata from four states, combined with national pension funding data, we show these plans have accumulated substantial unfunded liabilities—effectively debt—owing to previous plan operations. On average across 49 state plans, an amount that exceeds 10% of current teachers’ earnings is being set aside to pay for previously a…
Does the Match Matter? Exploring Whether Student Teaching Experiences Affect Teacher Effectiveness
We use data from six Washington State teacher education programs to investigate the relationship between teacher candidates’ student teaching experiences and their later teaching effectiveness. Our primary finding is that teachers are more effective when the student demographics of their current school are similar to the student demographics of the school in which they did their student teaching. While descriptive, this suggests that the school c…
Psychology (52 works) · School Choice and Performance (49 works) · Mathematics education (39 works) · Political science (38 works) · Economics (33 works) · Medicine (28 works) · Pedagogy (24 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (22 works) · Academic achievement (20 works)