Background: In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a nationwide unplanned transition to distance learning. For teachers, these school closures resulted in a rapid, substantial transformation of their work. To date, however, almost all of the evidence surrounding the effects of COVID-19 on teachers has been collected retrospectively,…

Growing evidence suggests that teachers in developing countries often have weak or misaligned incentives for improving student outcomes. In response, policymakers and researchers have proposed performance pay as a way to improve student outcomes by tying concrete measures like achievement scores to teacher pay. While evidence from randomized…

For over a century, school systems in the U.S. have attempted to improve instructional quality by investing in the education and training of their teachers. Today, over 90% of teachers report participating in some form of professional development (PD). Practitioners have responded to critiques of PD by re-envisioning it in the form of…

Recent efforts to attract and retain effective educators and to improve teaching practices have focused on reforming evaluation and compensation systems for teachers and principals. In 2006, Congress established the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), which provides grants to support performance-based compensation systems for teachers and principals in…

Educators have long used test scores to make educational decisions, but only within the last decade has the availability of data been systematic (Abelman, Elmore, Even, Kenyon, & Marshall, 1999). In recent years, interest has spiked in data-driven decision making in education (Marsh, Pane, & Hamilton, 2006). With technological advances and…

To sustain its economic growth in the coming years, China will have to increase the country's supply of skilled labor by enabling its workforce to attain to higher levels of formal education. Unfortunately, when children in poor, rural areas today grow up, they may not be able to enjoy China's future economic prosperity because of their low levels…

"Success for All" (SFA) is one of the best known and thoroughly evaluated school reform models. Further evaluation of the initiative is especially important for two reasons. First, the program model has continued to evolve over time, with a greater emphasis placed on the use of engaging technology in the classroom and on the deployment…