We use matched employee–employer records from the teacher labor market to explore the effects of late teacher hiring on student achievement. Hiring teachers after the school year starts reduces student achievement by 0.042 SD in mathematics and 0.026 SD in reading. This reflects, in part, a temporary disruption effect in the first year. In mathematics, but not in reading, late‐hired teachers remain persistently less effective, evidence of negative selection in the teacher labor market. Late hiring concentrates in schools that disproportionately serve disadvantaged student populations, contributing to challenges in ensuring an equitable distribution of educational resources for all students.

Purpose: New teacher evaluation systems have expanded the role of principals as instructional leaders, but little is known about principals’ ability to promote teacher development through the evaluation process. We conducted a case study of principals’ perspectives on evaluation and their experiences implementing observation and feedback cycles to better understand whether principals feel as though they are able to promote teacher development as evaluators. Research Method: We conducted interviews with a stratified random sample of 24 principals in an urban district that recently implemented major reforms to its teacher evaluation system. We analyzed these interviews by drafting thematic summaries, coding interview transcripts, creating data-analytic matrices, and writing analytic memos. Findings: We found that the evaluation reforms provided a common framework and language that helped facilitate principals’ feedback conversations with teachers. However, we also found that tasking principals with primary responsibility for conducting evaluations resulted in a variety of unintended consequences which undercut the quality of evaluation feedback they provided. We analyze five broad solutions to these challenges: strategically targeting evaluations, reducing operational responsibilities, providing principal training, hiring instructional coaches, and developing peer evaluation systems. Implications: The quality of feedback teachers receive through the evaluation process depends critically on the time and training evaluators have to provide individualized and actionable feedback. Districts that task principals with primary responsibility for conducting observation and feedback cycles must attend to the many implementation challenges associated with this approach in order for next-generation evaluation systems to successfully promote teacher development.

For the 22% of American children who live below the federal poverty line, and the additional 23% who live below twice that level, nutritional policy is part of the safety net against hunger and its negative effects on children's development. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) provides steadily available food from the food groups essential for physical and cognitive development. The effects of WIC on dietary quality among participating women and children are strong and positive. Furthermore, there is a strong influence of nutrition on cognitive development and socioeconomic inequality. Yet, research on the non-health effects of U.S. child nutritional policy is scarce, despite the ultimate goal of health policies directed at children—to enable productive functioning across multiple social institutions over the life course. Using two nationally representative, longitudinal surveys of children—the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) and the Child Development Supplement (CDS) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics—I examine how prenatal and early childhood exposure to WIC is associated in the short-term with cognitive development, and in the longer-term with reading and math learning. Results show that early WIC participation is associated with both cognitive and academic benefits. These findings suggest that WIC meaningfully contributes to children's educational prospects.

This article explores the policy conversation and efforts around school integration in Chicago during the 1960s. It analyzes how a conversation that originated in demands for equality for black students was transformed into one about keeping whites in the city and analyzes the consequences of this shift. Worried that integration might produce more segregation as whites fled, the school board responded to the advice of experts and pleas of some white liberals to manage and stabilize integration in racially changing neighborhoods. Civil rights groups tried to keep educational equity for black students forefront in these discussions of integration, but the shift to managed integration put whites’ interests and needs first and stripped the discussion of integration of much of its structural critique. Yet managed integration did not work, undermining support for integration altogether and reinforcing fears and assumptions about the inevitability and undesirability of racial change.

Scholars suggest that racial/ethnic and class disparities in school-based social capital contribute to educational inequalities. Previous studies demonstrate that social capital (relations of trust, mutual expectations, and shared values) between parents and schools supports children's development. Yet we know little about the emergence of social capital, that is, the processes through which it develops. In this study, we explore mechanisms of social capital emergence in predominantly low-income Latino school communities. We draw data from an experimental study that manipulated social capital through an after-school family engagement program. Based on interviews and focus groups with participating parents, teachers, and program staff in two elementary schools, we identified four types of interactions that act as mechanisms of social capital emergence: (1) responsive communication; (2) reciprocal communication; (3) shared experiences; and (4) institutional linkage. The article connects these mechanisms to theoretically linked sources of social capital and discusses implications for theory and practice.

Title I has a mixed legacy. It helped cultivate and sustain the political salience of improving the education of children who live in poverty. It helped sweep schools, regardless of their student population’s poverty levels, into the broader national standards-accountability reform effort. It has been a vehicle for liberal, conservative, bipartisan, public, and private reform agendas. It developed durable constituencies and appetites for federal funds. While Title I helped expand governments’ administrative capabilities, it did much less to remedy the unevenness in instructional capability on which Title I built. The combination of Title I funds and standards based reform has enabled some interventions, such as Success for All and America’s Choice, to demonstrate instructional improvement. Yet the potential for interventions like these to reduce the achievement gap remains profoundly constrained by the persistently unequal allocation of educational resources, rising income inequality, and the lack of assistance from social and economic policy.

Title I has a mixed legacy that poses a paradox. Part of that legacy has yielded tremendous accomplishments. Title I asserted a federal priority to help disadvantaged students and broke with long resistance to a significant federal role in elementary and secondary schooling. It has deepened and expanded government responsibility and management of schooling at all levels—federal, state, and local. Over time, it has helped sweep schools, regardless of their student population's poverty levels, into the broader national standards‐accountability movement, most recently expressed in the Common Core. While resistance to some aspects of federal authority remains, and may have intensified, Title I has developed durable constituencies and appetites for federal funds. Improving the education of children who live in poverty remains politically salient. These are remarkable accomplishments. And these accomplishments are intimately intertwined with other policies, including the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which facilitated the passage of other legislation, such as Head Start and Title I. Title I's legacy is intertwined in other ways, beyond its connections with contemporaneous policies; and these dependencies will be the focus of my remarks today.

Highlights Value-added measures for principals have many of the same problems that value-added measures for teachers do, such as imprecision and questions about whether important outcomes are captured by the test on which the measures are based. While most measures of teachers' value-added and schools' value-added are based on a shared conception of the effects that teachers and schools have on their students, value-added measures for principals can vary in their underlying logic. The underlying logic on which the value-added measure is based matters a lot in practice. Evaluation models based on school effectiveness, which measure student test- score gains, tend not to be correlated at all with models based on school improvement, which measure changes in student test-score gains. The choice of model also changes the magnitude of the impact that principals appear to have on student outcomes. Estimates of principal effectiveness that are based on school effectiveness can be calculated for most principals. But estimates that are based on school effectiveness relative to the effectiveness of other principals who have served at the same school or estimates that are based on school improvement have stricter data requirements and, as a result, cover fewer principals. Models that assume that most of school effectiveness is attributable to the principal are more consistent with other measures of principal effectiveness, such as evaluations by the district. However, it is not clear whether these other measures are themselves accurate assessments. There is little empirical evidence on the advantages or disadvantages of using value-added measures to evaluate principals.

Although prior research has documented differences in the distribution of teacher characteristics across schools serving different student populations, few studies have examined the extent to which teacher sorting occurs within schools. This study uses data from one large urban school district and compares the class assignments of teachers who teach in the same grade and in the same school in a given year. The authors find that less experienced, minority, and female teachers are assigned classes with lower achieving students than are their more experienced, white, and male colleagues. Teachers who have held leadership positions and those who attended more competitive undergraduate institutions are also assigned higher achieving students. These patterns are found at both the elementary and middle/high school levels. The authors explore explanations for these patterns and discuss their implications for achievement gaps, teacher turnover, and the estimation of teacher value-added.

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, principals initiate the move, often demonstrating preferences to work in schools with higher achieving students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Principals often use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments. We use longitudinal data from one large urban school district to study the relationship between principal turnover and school outcomes. We find that principal turnover is, on average, detrimental to school performance. Frequent turnover of school leadership results in lower teacher retention and lower student achievement gains. Leadership changes are particularly harmful for high poverty schools, low-achieving schools, and schools with many inexperienced teachers. These schools not only suffer from high rates of principal turnover but are also unable to attract experienced successors. The negative effect of leadership changes can be mitigated when vacancies are filled by individuals with prior experience leading other schools. However, the majority of new principals in high poverty and low-performing schools lack prior leadership experience and leave when more attractive positions become available in other schools.