Decades of research evidence have consistently suggested teachers are the most important in-school factor related to student learning and achievement. Being taught by an effective teacher has important consequences for students' academic outcomes as well as longer-term impacts on postsecondary success and lifetime earnings. Yet how to measure…

Can successful schools replicate? In a climate of school turnarounds, charter conversions, and new school openings, an important question is whether schools that have demonstrated success with in one or several schools can replicate their success with additional schools. The federal government's Investing in Innovation (i3) grant program has been…

The purpose of this study is to develop an estimate of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) that will allow for reliable and valid comparisons among student subgroups, schools, and districts. A shrinkage-type estimator of AYP using the Bayesian framework is described. Using simulated data, the performance of the Bayes estimator will be compared to…

This study aims to determine whether educational accountability promotes educational triage. This study exploits a natural experiment in North Carolina in which standards increased first in math in 2006 and second in reading in 2008 to determine whether an increase in educational standards caused an increase in educational triage at the expense of…

There is a national need for effective interventions to improve school readiness and subsequent achievement in mathematics for students from low-income families. The purpose of this study was to implement and evaluate a 2-year preschool math intervention that began at preschool entry when children were 3 years of age and continued through the end…

In recent decades, much attention has been focused on student achievement in the United States. Many policy initiatives have been attempted in an effort to bolster achievement, including increasing school revenue, decreasing class size, expanding early childhood programs, and introducing vouchers and charter schools, to name a few, but not all of…

Head Start is a federally funded preschool program for poor children designed to help close the gap between those children and their more advantaged peers before they begin public schooling. Given that Head Start appears to have positive long-run impacts on its recipients, a natural and important next question to ask is: What are the channels…