Researchers and policymakers often assume that teacher turnover harms student achievement, but recent evidence calls into question this assumption. Using a unique identification strategy that employs grade-level turnover and two classes of fixed-effects models, this study estimates the effects of teacher turnover on over 850,000 New York City 4th and 5th grade student observations over eight years. The results indicate that students in grade-levels with higher turnover score lower in both ELA and math and that this effect is particularly strong in schools with more low-performing and black students. Moreover, the results suggest that there is a disruptive effect of turnover beyond changing the distribution in teacher quality.

Educators, policymakers, and citizens face questions of how to allocate scarce resources in the pursuit of competing goals for children and youth. Our goal in this article is to provide decision-makers with a framework for considering allocative problems in education, explicitly highlighting the implications of relevant feasibility constraints. We assume that the decision-maker cares about children's present and future welfare and that she gives priority to children whose welfare is lower. We highlight four especially relevant constraints: scarcity of resources, buy-in from community members, high-stakes consequences of skill development, and measurement of desired outcomes. Using four cases to illustrate common situations decision-makers face, we show that the framework provides both some understanding of the distributive decisions that are made in practice and some structure for thinking about how to optimize decisions in non-ideal settings.

This article examines how three Nashville educational support professionals' conceptions of empowerment map onto their civic expectations for their Latino/a students and themselves. It argues that these expectations are inversely related, with students standing as surrogates for professionals' civic selves or professionals acting as civic surrogates for students. The article shows how professionals' civic identities are formed in relation to their students and the classrooms where they work—complicating models of empowerment, citizenship, and out‐of‐school settings.

Our understanding of health and social stratification can be enriched by testing tenets of cumulative inequality theory that emphasize how the accumulation of inequality is dependent on the developmental stage being considered, the duration and stability of poor health, and the family resources available to children. I analyze longitudinal data from the British National Child Development Study (N = 9,252) to ask: (1) if child health is a source of cumulative inequality in academic achievement, (2) whether this relationship depends on the timing and duration of poor health, and (3) whether trajectories are sensitive to levels of family capital. The results suggest that the relationship between health and academic achievement emerges very early in life and persists and that whether we observe shrinking or widening inequality as children age depends on when we measure their health and whether children have access to compensatory resources.

We present new evidence on the relationship between teacher productivity and job experience. Econometric challenges require identifying assumptions to model the within-teacher returns to experience with teacher fixed effects. We describe the identifying assumptions used in past models and in a new approach that we propose, and we demonstrate how violations of these assumptions can lead to substantial bias. Consistent with past research, we find that teachers experience rapid productivity improvement early in their careers. However, we also find evidence of returns to experience later in the career, indicating that teachers continue to build human capital beyond these first years.

As schools and districts seek to recruit teachers, individuals in non-teaching professions are an appealing possible pool. These potential teachers come with work experience and may have expertise that would serve them well in the classroom. While there has been substantial rhetoric assailing the virtues of teachers with prior professional experience, no research that we know of has assessed the effectiveness of these teachers in terms of student learning. This study uses data from New York City to assess the relative effectiveness and retention of career-switchers. It provides some evidence that these teachers are no more effective than other new teachers, and, in fact, they appear to be less effective at raising math scores of elementary and middle school students. There is little difference in overall transfer or leave rates between teachers with prior experience and other teachers, although career-switchers from college recommended programs do appear more likely to transfer schools.

Purpose: We examine how uncertainty, both about students and the context in which they are taught, remains a persistent condition of teachers’ work in high-poverty, urban schools. We describe six schools’ organizational responses to these uncertainties, analyze how these responses reflect open- versus closed-system approaches, and examine how this orientation affects teachers’ work. Research Methods: We draw on interviews with a diverse set of 95 teachers and administrators across a purposive sample of six high-poverty, urban schools in one district. We analyzed these interviews by drafting thematic summaries, coding interview transcripts, creating data-analytic matrices, and writing analytic memos. Findings: We find that students introduced considerable uncertainty into teachers’ work. Although most teachers we spoke with embraced the challenges of their work and the expanded responsibilities that it entailed, they recognized that their individual efforts were not sufficient to succeed. Teachers consistently spoke about the need for organizational responses that addressed the environmental uncertainty of working with students from low-income families whose experience in school often has been unsuccessful. We describe four types of organizational responses—coordinated instructional supports, systems to promote order and discipline, socioemotional supports for students, and efforts to engage parents—and illustrate how these responses affected teachers’ ability to manage the uncertainty introduced by their environment. Conclusions: Traditional public schools are open systems and require systematic organizational responses to address the uncertainty introduced by their environments. Uncoordinated individual efforts alone are not sufficient to meet the needs of students in high-poverty urban communities.

Parental involvement is correlated with student performance, though the causal relationship is less well established. This experiment examined an intervention that delivered weekly one-sentence individualized messages from teachers to the parents of high school students in a credit recovery program. Messages decreased the percentage of students who failed to earn course credit from 15.8% to 9.3%—a 41% reduction. This reduction resulted primarily from preventing drop-outs, rather than from reducing failure or dismissal rates. The intervention shaped the content of parent–child conversations with messages emphasizing what students could improve, versus what students were doing well, producing the largest effects. We estimate the cost of this intervention per additional student credit earned to be less than one-tenth the typical cost per credit earned for the district. These findings underscore the value of educational policies that encourage and facilitate teacher-to-parent communication to empower parental involvement in their children's education.

We used self-report surveys to gather information on a broad set of non-cognitive skills from 1,368 eighth graders. At the student level, scales measuring conscientiousness, self-control, grit, and growth mindset are positively correlated with attendance, behavior, and test-score gains between fourth grade and eighth grade. Conscientiousness, self-control, and grit are unrelated to test-score gains at the school level, however, and students attending over-subscribed charter schools score lower on these scales than do students attending district schools. Exploiting admissions lotteries, we find positive impacts of charter school attendance on achievement and attendance but negative impacts on these non-cognitive skills. We provide suggestive evidence that these paradoxical results are driven by reference bias or the tendency for survey responses to be influenced by social context.