Evidence that teachers' short-term instructional effects persist over time and predict substantial long-run impacts on students' lives provides much of the impetus for a wide range of educational reforms focused on identifying and responding to differences in teachers' value-added to student learning. However, relatively little research has…

Measures of teachers' "value added" to student achievement play an increasingly central role in k-12 teacher policy and practice, in part because they have been shown to predict teachers' long-term impacts on students' life outcomes. However, little research has examined variation in the long-term effects of teachers with similar…

School districts are confronting difficult choices in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Today, the financial imbalance in many school districts is so large that there may be few alternatives to teacher layoffs. In nearly all school districts, layoffs are currently determined by some version of teacher seniority. Yet, alternative approaches to…

Although prior research has documented differences in the distribution of teacher characteristics across schools serving different student populations, few studies have examined the extent to which teacher sorting occurs within schools. This study uses data from one large urban school district and compares the class assignments of teachers who…

Purpose: Time demands faced by school principals make principals' work increasingly difficult. Research outside education suggests that effective time management skills may help principals meet job demands, reduce job stress, and improve their performance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate these hypotheses. Design/methodology/approach:…

More than one out of every five principals leaves their school each year. In some cases, these career changes are driven by the choices of district leadership. In other cases, principals initiate the move, often demonstrating preferences to work in schools with higher achieving students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Principals…

The authors use administrative data from three large urban school districts to describe student sorting within schools. Students are linked to each of their teachers and students' classmates are identified. There are differences in the average achievement levels, racial composition, and socioeconomic composition of classrooms within schools. This…

Many large urban school districts are rethinking their personnel management strategies, often giving increased control to schools in the hiring of teachers, reducing, for example, the importance of seniority. If school hiring authorities are able to make good decisions about whom to hire, these reforms have the potential to benefit schools and…

Alternative routes into teaching, particularly in urban school districts, are becoming increasingly prevalent. Four features capture the range of variation in these programs: the nature of the provider, specific labor market needs, the timing and focus of coursework and fieldwork, and the focus of recruitment and selection. The issue of student…

The capacity of the nation's public schools to recruit and retain highly skilled teachers is a perennial concern of policy makers and school leaders. Over the past two decades, major policy strategies including the federal No Child Left Behind Act and alternative pathways to teaching, as well as changes in the broader labor market, have altered…

Scholars have long argued that principals should be "instructional leaders," but few studies have empirically linked specific instructional leadership behaviors to school performance. This study examines the associations between leadership behaviors and student achievement gains using a unique data source: in-person, full-day…

Researchers and policymakers often assume that teacher turnover harms student achievement, though recent studies suggest this may not be the case. Using a unique identification strategy that employs school-by-grade level turnover and two classes of fixed-effects models, this study estimates the effects of teacher turnover on over 850,000 New York…

This article explores the relationship between school contextual factors and teacher retention decisions in New York City. The methodological approach separates the effects of teacher characteristics from school characteristics by modeling the relationship between the assessments of school contextual factors by one set of teachers and the turnover…

Many large urban school districts are rethinking their personnel management strategies, often giving increased control to schools in the hiring of teachers, reducing, for example, the importance of seniority. If school hiring authorities are able to make good decisions about whom to hire, these reforms have the potential to benefit schools and…

This paper analyzes attrition patterns among teachers in New York City public elementary and middle schools and explores whether teachers who transfer among schools, or leave teaching entirely, are more or less effective than those who remain. We find that the first-year teachers who are less effective in improving student math scores have higher…