Urban school districts often rely on alternative teacher certification programs to help address ongoing demands for recruiting and hiring qualified teachers. These programs offer pathways into teaching outside of traditional university-based teacher education programs. TNTP's Teaching Fellows program has been one of the most prominent alternative…

This study addresses two questions related to teacher preparation and certification: (1) What are the relative effects on student achievement of teachers who chose to be trained through different routes to certification and how do observed teacher practices vary by chosen route to certification?; and (2) What aspects of certification programs…

Teach For America (TFA) and the Teaching Fellows programs are an important and growing source of teachers of hard-to-staff subjects in high-poverty schools, but comprehensive evidence of their effectiveness has been limited. This report presents findings from the first large-scale random assignment study of secondary math teachers from these…

This last report from Mathematica's evaluation of Upward Bound analyzes data from the final round of survey and transcript data collection as well as administrative records from the National Student Clearinghouse and the federal Student Financial Aid files. It provides the first estimates of the effects of Upward Bound on postsecondary completion.…

This paper reports on a randomized experiment to study the impact of an alternative teacher preparation program, Teach for America (TFA), on student achievement and other outcomes. We found that TFA teachers had a positive impact on math achievement and no impact on reading achievement. The size of the impact on math scores was about 15 percent of…