School value-added models are widely applied to study, monitor, and hold schools to account for school differences in student learning. The traditional model is a mixed-effects linear regression of student current achievement on student prior achievement, background characteristics, and a school random intercept effect. The latter is referred to…

It is a much-lamented fact that research with the potential to inform or influence education policy instead remains policy inert. There are many reasons for this frustrating state of affairs, including a lack of strategic thinking on the part of researchers on how to successfully accomplish outreach--as opposed to communication with peers…

We study the relative performance of two policy-relevant value-added models--a one-step fixed effect model and a two-step aggregated residuals model--using a simulated data set well grounded in the value-added literature. A key feature of our data generating process is that student achievement depends on a continuous measure of economic…

The traditional approach to estimating the consistency of school effects across subject areas and the stability of school effects across time is to fit separate value-added multilevel models to each subject or cohort and to correlate the resulting empirical Bayes predictions. We show that this gives biased correlations and these biases cannot be…

Measures of school-level growth in student outcomes are common tools for assessing the impacts of schools. The vast majority of these measures use standardized tests as the outcome of interest, even though emerging evidence demonstrates the importance of social-emotional learning (SEL). In this article, we present results from using the first…