This policy brief summarizes the responses by early-career science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers in Washington State to the Washington STEM Teacher Survey. These early-career STEM teachers were asked about their perspectives of their teacher education program (TEP) and STEM subject preparation, with a focus on their student…

We use a novel database of over 15,000 teacher candidates from 15 teacher education programs in Washington state to investigate the connections between specific teacher preparation experiences (e.g., endorsements, licensure test scores, and student teaching placements) and the likelihood that these candidates enter and leave the state's public…

In this paper, we use NWEA MAP test data to examine variation in students' achievement and growth during the pandemic across multiple dimensions. Consistent with prior evidence, we find that students' test scores in fall 2021, on average, were substantially below historic averages. Moreover, the average scores of students of color, students…

Policymakers aiming to close the well-documented achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students have increasingly turned their attention to issues of teacher quality. A number of studies have demonstrated that teachers are inequitably distributed across student subgroups by input measures, like experience and qualifications, as well…

We study the effectiveness of teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) in Washington State, which has one of the largest populations of National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) in the nation. Based on value-added models in math and reading, we find that NBPTS certified teachers are about 0.01-0.05…