Evidence on the effect of extending the school day is decidedly mixed because of the stark differences in how schools use additional time. In this paper, I focus narrowly on the effect of additional time used for individualized tutorials. In 2005, MATCH Charter Public High School integrated two hours of tutorials throughout an extended day. The unanticipated implementation of this initiative and the school's admissions lottery allow me to use two complementary quasi-experimental methods to estimate program effects. I find that providing students with daily tutorials that are integrated into the school day and taught by full-time, recent college graduates increased achievement on tenth-grade English language arts exams by 0.15–0.25 standard deviations per year. I find no average effect in mathematics beyond the large gains students were already achieving, although quantile regression estimates suggest the tutorials raised the lowest end of the achievement distribution in mathematics.

Despite claims that school districts need flexibility in teacher assignment to allocate teachers more equitably across schools and improve district performance, the power to involuntarily transfer teachers to different schools remains hotly contested in many districts because of the potential for teachers to be treated arbitrarily or unfairly. Little research has examined involuntary transfer policies or their effects on schools, teachers, or students. This article uses administrative data from Miami-Dade County Public Schools to examine the district's involuntary transfer policy, including which schools utilized the opportunity to transfer teachers, which teachers were chosen, where they were moved, and how their performance as measured by student value-added compared before and after the transfer. We find that the policy was effective at identifying for transfer relatively low-performing teachers in the lowest-performing schools who, on the basis of observable characteristics, would have been unlikely to leave on their own. We also find that involuntarily transferred teachers were systematically moved to higher-performing schools, suggesting that policy may be equity-enhancing. However, their performance in the new schools continued to be low, suggesting few efficiency gains from better matching.

Researchers have devoted substantial attention to the use of student test score data to measure teacher performance. In response to recent policy interest in using student achievement data to measure the contributions of school administrators as well, this paper investigates the capacity of longitudinal achievement data to uncover principal effects. Building on prior research, it develops multiple models for capturing the contributions of principals to student test score growth, examines the properties of each model, and compares the results of the models empirically. It then assesses the degree to which the estimates from each model are consistent with measures of principal performance that come from sources other than student test scores, such as school district evaluations. It finds that the approach that attributes the school's effectiveness to the principal more closely aligns with non-test-based measures than do approaches that more convincingly separate the effect of the principal from the effects of other school inputs.

Hoping to spur dramatic school turnaround, the federal government channeled resources to the country’s lowest-performing schools through School Improvement Grants (SIG). However, prior research on SIG effectiveness is limited and focuses primarily on student achievement. This study uses a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate program impacts on multiple dimensions across the 3-year duration of the SIG award in one urban school district. Following 2 years of modest improvement, we find pronounced, positive effects of SIG interventions on student achievement in Year 3, consistent with prior literature indicating that improvements from comprehensive school turnarounds emerge gradually. We also identify improvements indicating the process through which change occurred, including reduced unexcused absences, increased family preference for SIG schools, improved retention of effective teachers, and greater development of teacher professional capacity.

Using longitudinal administrative data—including achievement data from untested grades—and teacher survey data from a large urban district, this study examines schools’ responses to those pressures in assigning teachers to high-stakes and low-stakes classrooms. The authors find that teachers with more positive performance measures in both tested and untested classrooms are more likely to be placed in a tested classroom in the following year. In elementary schools, the study shows that such “strategic” teacher assignment disadvantages early grades, concentrating less effective teachers in K–2 classrooms. Reassignment of ineffective upper-grades teachers to early grades systematically results in lower K–2 math and reading achievement gains.

While the importance of effective principals is undisputed, few studies have addressed what speciá´€c skills principals need to promote school success. á¼€is study draws on unique data combining survey responses from principals, assistant principals, teachers and parents with rich administrative data to identify which principal skills matter most for school outcomes. Factor analysis of a 42-item task inventory distinguishes five skill categories, yet only one of them, the principals' organization management skills, consistently predicts student achievement growth and other success measures. Analysis of evaluations of principals by assistant principals coná´€rms this central result. Our analysis argues for a broad view of instructional leadership that includes general organizational management skills as a key complement to the work of supporting curriculum and instruction.

In light of the difficulty many districts face finding quality principal candidates, this article explores an informal recruitment mechanism of teachers to become principals, which the authors call tapping. The authors assess the extent to which current teachers are being approached by school leaders to consider leadership and whether this tapping prompts these teachers to consider pursuing leadership positions. Research Design: This study uses survey and administrative data on teachers and principals from the Miami-Dade County Public Schools from the 2007–2008 school year. The authors describe the extent to which principals tap teachers to become school leaders. They use multiple regression with and without school fixed effects to model which teachers are most likely to be tapped and which principals are most likely to tap teachers. They also estimate the extent to which tapping is effective at motivating teachers to become school leaders. Findings: A vast majority of principals report having been tapped by their own principal when they were teachers. The authors find that principals tend to tap teachers who feel better equipped to take on the principalship and who have more school-level leadership experience, but they also disproportionately tap teachers who are male and share their ethnicity. Conclusions: The findings provide evidence that principals are capable of effectively identifying and encouraging teachers with strong leadership potential to enter the principal pipeline, although additional training and a succession management plan may help ensure that teachers are selected based on clear leadership competencies.

The literature on effective schools emphasizes the importance of a quality teaching force in improving educational outcomes for students. In this paper, we use value-added methods to examine the relationship between a school's effectiveness and the recruitment, assignment, development and retention of its teachers. Are effective schools effective because they happen to have recruited good teachers or do effective schools systematically recruit, develop and retain more effective teachers each year? Our results reveal four key findings. First, we find that more effective schools are able to attract and hire more effective teachers from other schools when vacancies arise. Second, we find that more effective schools assign novice teachers to students in a more equitable fashion. Across all schools we find that novice teachers are assigned lower achieving students than their more experienced colleagues at their school; however, the magnitude of this relationship is weaker in more effective schools. Third, teachers who work in schools that were more effective at raising achievement in a prior period improve more rapidly in a subsequent period than do those in less effective schools. Finally, we find that more effective schools are better able to retain higher-quality teachers. The results point to the importance of personnel, and perhaps, school personnel practices, for improving school outcomes.

This report and accompanying policy brief show that there is good reason to pursue the measurement of social-emotional learning (SEL) and school culture/climate (CC) as a way to better understand student and school performance. Using data from California's CORE districts, we show that SEL and CC measures demonstrate reliability and validity, distinguish between schools, are related to other academic and non-academic measures, and also illuminate dimensions of student achievement that go beyond traditional indicators. We also show how the SEL and CC measures can be used to identify areas of improvement within schools, such as identifying subgroup gaps or differences in reports between various respondent groups. Summary and Policy Implications Policy makers, educators, and the broader public increasingly agree that students' development of social-emotional skills is important for success in academic and life outcomes. Research provides evidence that schools can facilitate the development of these skills, both directly and through the implementation of policies and practices that improve a school's culture and climate and promote positive relationships. Growing confidence that schools can contribute to students' social-emotional development has led some districts and states nationwide to consider including measures of of socialemotional learning (SEL) and school culture and climate (CC) in systems of school accountability and continuous improvement. This policy brief summarizes our recent research using data from the CORE districts— districts serving nearly one million students who have embraced systematic measurement of SEL and CC—to provide guidance for state and local policy makers about the suitability of SEL and CC surveys as school performance indicators and how they can be used in a broader set of measures. We find that the CORE measures of SEL and CC demonstrate validity and reliability, distinguish between schools, are related to other academic and non-academic measures, and illuminate dimensions of student achievement that go beyond traditional indicators, all initial indications of the measures' promise for informing school improvement. Our results also demonstrate the importance of reporting SEL and CC measures by subgroup, as African American and Hispanic/Latino students report lower SEL and CC compared to peers even within the same schools. While the measures of SEL and CC provide new information for school improvement, given remaining questions about the measures' sensitivity to change over time, the effect of schools on improving SEL and CC outcomes, and the potential for measures to be gamed, further research is needed to understand the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating them into higher stakes accountability systems.

Evidence that teachers’ short-term instructional effects persist over time and predict substantial long-run impacts on students’ lives provides much of the impetus for a wide range of educational reforms focused on identifying and responding to differences in teachers’ value-added to student learning. However, relatively little research has examined how the particular types of knowledge or skills that teachers impart to students contribute to their longer-term success. In this article, we investigate the persistence of teachers’ value-added effects on student learning over multiple school years and across subject areas. We find that, in comparison with math teachers, English language arts (ELA) teachers’ impacts on same-subject standardized achievement scores are smaller in the year of instruction, but that teacher-induced gains to ELA achievement appear to reflect more broadly applicable skills that persist in supporting student learning in the long run across disciplines. Our results highlight important variation in the quality of teacher-induced learning for long-run success, distinct from the variation across teachers in more typically measured short-term learning effects.