Background: Teacher quality matters for student achievement (Coleman, 1968; Rivkin et al., 2005; Rockoff, 2004; Aaronson et al., 2007) and later career success (Chetty et al., 2014). States use licensure exams as a quality screen believing that they are predictive of teaching effectiveness (Council et al., 2001). However, the evidence on the…

Background: The generalizability of a study's results continues to be at the forefront of concerns in evaluation research in education (Tipton & Olsen, 2018). Over the past decade, statisticians have developed methods, mainly based on propensity scores, to improve generalizations in the absence of random sampling (Stuart et al., 2011; Tipton,…

Background/Context: Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model is a commonly adopted framework to estimate and test a measurement model. Once a well-fitting final CFA model is selected, the selected model may be used to test structural relationships of the latent constructs with other variables, to construct a test with desired reliability and…

Background: Evidence from education randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) demonstrates how interventions can improve children's educational achievement [1, 2, 3, 4]. RCTs assess the impact of an intervention by comparing outcomes--aggregate test scores--between treatment and control groups. A review of…

Background/Context: In order to stimulate national and regional economic growth, policymakers and businesses have expressed great interest in growing the supply of workers with skills in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). At the same time, considerable efforts are being devoted to narrowing race and gender gaps in the STEM training…

Background/Context: Staff turnover is a critical issue for practitioners and policymakers alike. Especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, significant attention has been dedicated to developing policy interventions to address high staff shortages. Intervention around staffing instability may be particularly pertinent for special…

Background: The past half-century has resulted in a substantial expansion of early childhood center-based care in the United States. Today, over 74% of American children aged 3-5 attend center-based care (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2021). Although public pre-k is considered socially favorable,…

In a randomized controlled trial (RCT), some subjects assigned to the treatment condition may not fully comply. Often there is interest in the effect of the treatment within the "principal stratum" of subjects who would comply if assigned to treatment. However, it is unknown which control subjects would have complied if treated and which…

Advocates for the use of a multi-measure system of performance evaluation argue that multiple measures may better capture meaningful differences in employee effectiveness and help align effort with organizational objectives. This may be particularly important in organizations such as schools that produce multiple outcomes. In this paper I use a…

Background/Context: Students classified as Long-Term English Learners (LTELs) are those who have not gained fluency in the English language, even after being enrolled in the U.S. K-12 educational system for five to seven years (Olsen, 2014). Although LTELs are not consistently tracked across states, we know they constitute a sizeable portion of…

Background/Context: Regression discontinuity (RD) designs are used for policy and program evaluation where subjects' eligibility into a program or policy is determined by whether an assignment variable (i.e., running variable) exceeds a pre-defined cutoff. Under a standard RD design with a continuous assignment variable, the average treatment…

Background/Context: English learners (ELs) have the potential to bring much-needed multilingual skills to the workforce, and most ELs aspire to graduate high school and earn a post-secondary credential (Gwynne, Pareja, Ehrlich, & Allensworth, 2012; Shi & Watkinson, 2019). But active ELs graduate high school at far lower rates than their…

Background/Context: Spurred by changes in federal policy, Response to Intervention (RTI) has witnessed increased adoption across states and districts in the past several decades (Berkeley et al., 2020). Originating in the special education field, RTI involves a shift from a uniform instructional approach to a tiered instructional approach…

Social and Emotional Learning and Its Measurement: The ability to understand and effectively interact with others is a critical determinant of academic, social, and life success (DiPerna & Elliott, 2002). This fact is increasingly recognized in educational policy and practice. For example, an influential report by the National Academy of…

Background/Context: Parents and policymakers have long believed that some schools are more effective than others. State testing requirements under No Child Left Behind helped publicize the widely understood fact that schools differ substantially in their students average test scores and treated such scores as key proxies for school quality. More…