Educators raise concerns about what happens to students when they are exposed to new or new-to-school teachers. However, even when teachers remain in the same school they can switch roles by moving grades and/or subjects. We use panel data from New York City to compare four ways in which teachers are new to assignment: new to teaching, new to district, new to school, or new to subject/grade. We find negative effects of having a churning teacher of about one third the magnitude of the effect of a new teacher. However the average student is assigned to churning teachers four times more often than to new teachers, and historically underserved students are slightly more likely to be assigned to churning teachers.

Online college courses are a rapidly expanding feature of higher education, yet little research identifies their effects relative to traditional in-person classes. Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that taking a course online, instead of in-person, reduces student success and progress in college. Grades are lower both for the course taken online and in future courses. Students are less likely to remain enrolled at the university. These estimates are local average treatment effects for students with access to both online and in-person options; for other students online classes may be the only option for accessing college-level courses.

In recent years, states and districts have responded to federal incentives and pressure to institute major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. The passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 now provides state policymakers with even greater autonomy to redesign existing evaluation systems. Yet, little evidence exists to inform decisions about two key system design features: teacher performance measure weights and performance ratings thresholds. Using data from the Measures of Effective Teaching study, we conduct simulation-based analyses that illustrate the critical role that performance measure weights and ratings thresholds play in determining teachers’ summative evaluation ratings and the distribution of teacher proficiency rates. These findings offer insights to policymakers and administrators as they refine and possibly remake teacher evaluation systems.

The vast differences in summer learning activities among children present a substantial challenge to providing equal educational opportunity in the United States. Most initiatives aimed at reversing summer learning loss focus on school- or center-based programs. This study explores the potential of enabling parents to provide literacy development opportunities at home as a low-cost alternative. We conduct a randomized field trial of a summer text-messaging pilot program for parents focused on promoting literacy skills among first through fourth graders. We find positive effects on reading comprehension among third and fourth graders, with effect sizes of .21 to .29 standard deviations, but no effects for first and second graders. Texts also increased attendance at parent-teacher conferences but not at other school-related activities. Evidence to inform future efforts to reverse summer learning loss is provided by parents’ responses to a follow-up survey.

Using data from North Carolina, Jesse Rothstein (2017) presents a comprehensive replication of Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff’s [CFR] (2014a,b) results on teachers’ impacts. In addition, Rothstein presents new evidence that he argues raises concerns about three aspects of CFR’s methods and identification assumptions: their treatment of missing data, the validity of their quasi-experimental design, and their method of controlling for observables when estimating teachers’ long-term effects. In this paper, we show that Rothstein’s methodological critiques are not valid by replicating his new empirical findings using simulated data in which none of CFR’s identification assumptions are violated. We also present supplementary empirical evidence from our data supporting the assumptions required for CFR’s original analyses. Together, these results show that: (1) Rothstein’s technique for imputing teacher VA for teachers with missing data generates bias, while subsamples with no missing data yield estimates of forecast bias similar to CFR’s baseline results; (2) his proposed prior score “placebo test” rejects valid quasiexperimental research designs, and the correlation between changes in prior test scores and current teacher value-added he documents is an artifact of estimating teacher value-added using prior test score data; and (3) his method of controlling for covariates yields inconsistent estimates of teachers’ long-term effects, while quasi-experimental designs that do not rely on controls for observables yield estimates of teachers’ long-term impacts similar to CFR’s baseline results. We conclude that Rothstein’s important replication study is entirely consistent with – and in fact reinforces – CFR’s methods and results. Our conclusions match those of Bacher-Hicks, Kane, and Staiger (2014), who replicate both CFR’s results and Rothstein’s findings using data from Los Angeles and also conclude that Rothstein’s results raise no concerns about CFR’s analysis.

Sponsored by the U.S. Office of Education, pursuant to Title IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Equality of Educational Opportunity survey (EEOS) – commonly known as the Coleman Report (Cole et al. 1966) – was tasked with assessing inequality in American schools and its consequences for student achievement. In the 50 years since the EEOS first appeared in print, ten of thousands of articles and studies have taken up the questions that Coleman raised, the methods that he used, and the conclusions that he reached. The provision of public education remains bedrock to domestic and international social and economic policy. Much political debate and scholarship focuses on how to reduce the gaps in achievement that appear along socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic lines by improving schools: how to improve the distribution of financial resources, and how to introduce rigorous curricula. A largely separate body of research simultaneously attends to the out-of-school factors that affect inequality in student achievement; revealing strong inequalities in children’s skill development well before school entry…

Children who enter kindergarten healthy and ready to learn are more likely to succeed academically. Children at the highest risk for not being ready for school live in poverty and/or with chronic health conditions. High-quality early childhood education (ECE) programs can be used to help kids be ready for school; however, the United States lacks a comprehensive ECE system, with only half of 3- and 4-year-olds being enrolled in preschool, lagging behind 28 high-income countries. As addressing social determinants of health gains prominence in pediatric training and practice, there is increasing interest in addressing ECE disparities. Unfortunately, evidence is lacking for clinically based, early educational interventions. New interventions are being developed asynchronously in pediatrics and education, often without knowledge of the evidence base in the other’s literature. In this State-of-the-Art Review, we synthesize the relevant work from the field of education (searchable through the Education Resources Information Center, also known as the “PubMed” of education), combining it with relevant literature in PubMed, to align the fields of pediatrics and education to promote this timely transdisciplinary work. First, we review the education literature to understand the current US achievement gap. Next, we provide an update on the impact of child health on school readiness and explore emerging solutions in education and pediatrics. Finally, we discuss next steps for future transdisciplinary work between the fields of education and pediatrics to improve the health and school readiness of young children.

When I was a teacher, I quickly came to appreciate how profoundly my students' experiences outside of school influenced their performance in the classroom. My daily work to support their learning was certainly important, but sometimes my best efforts in the classroom were not enough. On occasion, I would reach out to parents for help and to better understand what students were experiencing outside of school. Through these conversations, I was also able to give parents detailed information about how their child was doing in my class and suggestions on how they could support my efforts in the classroom. In turn, parents gave me new insights into the specific circumstances and learning needs of their children. But because of the daily demands on my time and the lack of schoolwide support, I contacted parents less frequently than would have benefitted me or my students.

As a researcher, I've come to appreciate even more strongly the potential of schools' efforts to engage parents as partners in students' learning. A large body of literature dating back over a half century to the famous Coleman Report in 1966 illustrates how factors outside of school are the dominant influence on students' academic achievement (Altonji & Mansfield, 2011; Nye, Konstantopoulos, & Hedges, 2004;). Simply put, while effective teachers and solid curricula are crucial, the role that parents play in shaping students' educational experiences and supporting their in-school success cannot be overstated. When parents foster positive learning environments at home and are engaged in their students' schooling, kids have much better academic outcomes (Houtenville & Conway, 2008; Todd & Wolpin, 2007).

Teacher teams are increasingly common in urban schools. In this study, we analyze teachers’ responses to teams in six high-poverty schools. Teachers used two criteria to assess teams’ goodness of fit in meeting the demands of their work: whether their teams helped them teach better and whether the team contributed to a better school. Their responses differed notably by school, depending largely on the principal’s approach to implementation. In the three schools where teachers assessed teams favorably, principals set a meaningful purpose for teachers’ collaborative work, provided structural support and professional expertise for their deliberations, and established safe environments for teachers’ on-the-job growth.

Value-added (VA) models measure agents' productivity based on the outcomes they produce. The utility of VA models for performance evaluation depends on the extent to which VA estimates are biased by selection. One common method of evaluating bias in VA is to test for balance in lagged values of the outcome. We show that such balance tests do not yield robust information about bias in value-added models using Monte Carlo simulations. Even unbiased VA estimates can be correlated with lagged outcomes. More generally, tests using lagged outcomes are uninformative about the degree of bias in misspecified VA models. The source of these results is that VA is itself estimated using historical data, leading to non-transparent correlations between VA and lagged outcomes.