We use 35 years of data on public school teachers in Washington to calculate several different measures of teacher attrition and mobility. We explore how these rates vary over time and their relationship with the state unemployment rate. Annual rates of teacher attrition from the workforce have been between 5% and 8% for each of the past 35 years,…

Kentucky's Targeted Interventions (TI) program is a statewide intervention intended to prepare non-college-ready high school students for college-level coursework. Using a difference-in-regression discontinuity design, we find that TI reduces the likelihood that students enroll in remedial courses by 8 to 10 percentage points in math. These…

Education policy makers must make decisions under uncertainty. Thus, how they think about risks has important implications for resource allocation, interventions, innovation, and the information that is provided to the public. In this policy brief we illustrate how the standard of evidence for making decisions can be quite inconsistently applied,…

The COVID-19 pandemic heightened tensions around standardized testing policy and prompted the United States Department of Education to allow states to request waivers from federal standardized testing requirements. Paul Bruno and Dan Goldhaber describe the waivers that states requested and received, what they suggest about how state test results…

Longitudinal administrative data generated by public education systems in the United States have become increasingly available and have tremendous potential to inform policy research. While it is tempting to take the accuracy of administrative data for granted, there are reasons why researchers should approach these data with a degree of caution.…

The use of test scores as a performance measure in high-stakes educational accountability has become increasingly popular since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which imposed sanctions such as the threat of losing federal funds unless a state implemented a school accountability system that measures student progress…

We study a teacher incentive policy in Washington State that awards a financial bonus to National Board certified teachers in high poverty schools. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that the bonus policy increased the proportion of certified teachers in bonus-eligible schools by improving hiring, increasing certification rates of…

Empirical evidence shows that disadvantaged students tend to have less-qualified and less-effective teachers than their more-advantaged peers. These teacher quality gaps (TQGs), which have existed for decades and across many measures of student disadvantage and teacher quality, are an important factor explaining student achievement gaps between…

There is considerable speculation and some empirical evidence that teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in urban school districts are more restrictive to district administrators than CBAs in other districts. We build on prior work by comparing urban with nonurban CBAs in three states--California, Michigan, and Washington--and, for a set…

We examine more than 1,000 collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in place across California, Michigan, and Washington. We investigate the prevalence of a set of 43 key provisions between and within these states, providing the first comprehensive comparison of CBA terms using data drawn from economically and demographically different districts,…

There is mounting evidence of substantial "teacher quality gaps" (TQGs) between advantaged and disadvantaged students but practically no empirical evidence about their history. We use longitudinal data on public school students, teachers, and schools from two states--North Carolina and Washington--to provide a descriptive history of the…

Though policymakers are increasingly concerned about teacher shortages in U.S. public schools, the national discussion does not reflect historical patterns of the supply of and demand for newly minted teachers. Specifically, the production of teacher candidates has increased steadily since the mid-1980s, and only about half of graduating teacher…

Improving teacher evaluation is one of the most pressing but also contested areas of educational policy. Value-added measures have received much of the attention in new evaluation systems, but they can only be used to evaluate a fraction of teachers. Classroom observations are almost universally used to assess teachers, yet their statistical…

In this policy brief we argue that there is little debate about the statistical properties of value-added model (VAM) estimates of teacher performance, yet, despite this, there is little consensus about what the evidence about VAMs implies for their practical utility as part of high-stakes performance evaluation systems. A review of the evidence…

One consequence of the Great Recession is that teacher layoffs occurred at a scale previously unseen. In this article, we assess the effects of receiving a layoff notice on teacher mobility using data from Los Angeles and Washington State. Our analyses are based on 6-year panels of data in each site, including 4 years of layoffs. We find that the…