Building Teacher Teams: Evidence of Positive Spillovers From More Effective Colleagues Min Sun, Susanna Loeb, Jason A. Grissom First Published March 1, 2017 Research Article https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373716665698 Article information Article has an altmetric score of 24 Full Access Abstract Student peer effects are well documented; however, we know far less about peer effects among teachers. We hypothesize that a relatively effective teacher can positively affect the performance of his or her peers, whereas a relatively ineffective teacher may negatively affect the performance of other teachers with whom he or she works closely. Utilizing a decade of data on teacher transfers between schools that result in changes of peers when transfer teachers enter grade-level team in the new school, we find evidence of strong positive spillover effects associated with the introduction of peers who are more effective than the incumbent teacher himself or herself. However, the incumbent teacher’s students are not meaningfully disadvantaged by the entry of relatively ineffective peers. This finding provides initial evidence that mixing teachers with diverse performance levels can increase student achievement in the aggregate. These results are robust to several student sorting and teacher selection issues.

As educational policy makers seek strategies to improve the teacher workforce, the early career period represents a unique opportunity to identify struggling teachers, examine the likelihood of future improvement, and make strategic pretenure investments in development or dismissals. It is also a useful time to identify particularly promising teachers for development and focus on high-needs areas. This article asks how much teachers vary in performance improvement during their first 5 years of teaching and to what extent initial job performance predicts later performance. We find that, on average, initial performance is quite predictive of future performance, far more so than typically measured teacher characteristics. This is particularly the case in math, while predictions about future English language arts (ELA) performance based on initial ELA value added are less precise. Predictions are most powerful at the extremes. We use these predictions to explore the likelihood that personnel actions based on initial performance would lead to inappropriate distinctions between teachers who would be high or low performing in future years. We also examine the much less discussed costs of failure to distinguish performance when meaningful differences exist. The results point to the potential of policies that make use of teachers' initial performance to inform personnel decisions.

While just about all students miss school some days during their elementary and secondary years for occasional sickness and family needs, some students miss school far more often. One conservative estimate is that 10 percent of students miss at least 10 percent of school days each year. On top of being counted as absent for the full day, many students skip classes even when they are officially in school. In fact, students are as likely to miss a class because they simply choose to skip than they are to miss because they are out for the day. As shown in Figure below, students' unexcused class absence rate, on days they attend at some point, doubles once they enter high school (at least in this urban school district). Moreover, unexcused class absences on days when students are in school explains almost all of the increase in total absences in high school. Missing school and skipping class is consequential. Using variation in attendance caused by inclement weather, one study estimated that each additional absence reduced math achievement by 0.05 standard deviations, suggesting that attendance can account for up to one-fourth of the achievement gap by income. A similar study using data on students in Philadelphia found that living farther from school increased absences and resulted in lower grade point averages and test scores. Click here to read full report

Highlights: Value-added measures are not a good source of information for helping teachers improve because they provide little information on effective and actionable practices. School, district, and state leaders may be able to improve teaching by using value-added to shape decisions about programs, human resources, and incentives. Value-added measures of improvement are more precise measures for groups of teachers than they are for individual teachers, thus they may provide useful information on improvement associated with practices, programs or schools. Many incentive programs for staff performance that are based on student performance have not shown benefits. Research points to the difficulty of designing these programs well and maintaining them politically. Value-added measures for selecting and improving programs, for informing human resource decisions, and for incentives are likely to be more useful when they are combined with other measures. We still have only a limited understanding of how best to use value-added measures in combination with other measures as tools for improvement.

Policy makers and school leaders are perennially concerned with the capacity of the nation's public schools to recruit and retain highly skilled teachers. Over the past two decades, policy strategies including the federal No Child Left Behind Act and alternative pathways to teaching, as well as changes in the broader labor market, have altered the context in which academically skilled college graduates choose whether to enter teaching, and, if so, where to teach. Using data from 1993 to 2008, we find that schools nationwide are recruiting a greater share of academically skilled college graduates into teaching, and that increases in teachers’ academic skills are especially large in urban school districts that serve predominantly nonwhite students. On the other hand, the increase in the share of academically skilled teachers coincides with the lower likelihood of nonwhite teachers being employed. Once teaching, nonwhite teachers report substantially lower job satisfaction than other teachers. The issue of how to recruit and support an academically skilled and diverse teacher workforce remains pressing.

Districts, states and researchers are using value-added models with increasing frequency to evaluate educational policies and programs, as well as teachers and other educators individually. Despite their prevalence, little research assesses whether value-added measures (VAM) are consistent across student subgroups. Are teachers who are effective with one group of students also effective with others? If they are not, then it may be worthwhile to develop separate measures of teacher effectiveness for different student groups; if they are, a single, average measure will likely suffice. Our paper uses data from a large, urban district with a considerable English learner (EL) population to compare teachers' VAM with ELs to the same teachers' VAM with non-ELs. We find that teachers who are effective with ELs also tend to be effective with their non-ELs and vice-versa. We also, however, find evidence that some teachers are relatively more effective with ELs than with non-ELs, and that this increased efficacy is predicted by a teacher's fluency in students' home language and whether he or she possesses a bilingual teaching certification.

This paper models the effect of increased state involvement in school funding on education spending levels. Unlike previous studies that have assumed perfect sorting of voters into districts by income, this analysis assumes demand sorting. I, thus, am able to utilize the true distribution of wealth across districts to estimate tax price changes and to predict changes in district spending levels in response to a change in financing rules. I look specifically at three types of state funding programs: those in which districts receive a set per pupil grant from the state and are not allowed to raise additional funds, those in which districts are allowed to raise unlimited additional funds, and those in which this supplementation is capped. Both the model and the subsequent simulations indicate that the ostensible benefits of a system with unlimited local supplementation – that it retains much local control over funding decisions on the margin while insuring an ‘adequate' level of financing for all districts – may not be sustainable because high wealth districts have no incentive to support state funding. Additionally, a system with no local supplementation may be politically difficult because it forces many voters far from their preferred spending levels. Capped supplementation provides a balance between local control and spending equity.

We are in the midst of what amounts to a national experiment in how best to attract, prepare, and retain teachers, particularly for high poverty urban schools. Using data on New York City students and their teachers in grades three through eight, we assess the effects of pathways into teaching on the teacher workforce and student achievement. We consider whether teachers entering through alternative certification routes alter the attributes of the teacher work force, how the achievement gains of the students of alternative route teachers compare to those of other teachers, and the relative retention of teachers across pathways.

A study investigated the relationship between the quality of schools subsequently attended by adolescents and their preschool experience. In particular, the study differentiated the characteristics of middle-grade schools attended by 8th grade students who had experienced either Head Start, other preshools, or no preschool. School quality was defined broadly, in terms of social composition, academic rigor, safety, and social relations. After taking into account family background and demographics, the study found that former Head Start attendees are being educated in schools of significantly lower quality than are their 8th-grade counterparts who did not attend preschool, and particularly compared to peers who attended other preschools. No matter how beneficial the Head Start experience was initially for its participants, such benefits are likely to be undermined if these students are thereafter exposed to lower quality schooling. The particularly low quality of middle-grade schools attended by former Head Start participants explains, at least in part, why Head Start effects often fade out over time.

The study presented here uses data from the NORC General Social Surveys to explore the effects of measurable school characteristics on student achievement. What separates this study from many others is the use of aggregate data on older cohorts, usually associated with research on the influence of school inputs on earnings. We fmd substantively large effects, similar in size to those found in many earnings-focused studies. Our results point to the impor- tance of aggregation in modeling the relationship between school inputs and student outcomes, bringing into question causal interpretations of the results of studies using aggregate data to assess school input effects.