Like other public workers, teachers typically receive high and compressed ratings that do little to differentiate them based on performance. Motivated by empirical evidence of substantial variation in effectiveness among teachers, there has been a recent push to develop more informative evaluation systems with greater ratings dispersion. We study…

Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS)--a strategy to improve families' access to high-quality child care--assess the quality of child care programs, offer incentives and assistance to programs to improve their ratings, and give information to parents about the quality of child care. These systems are operating in a growing number of…

We examined the persistence of teacher effects from grade to grade on lower-performing students using data from Project STAR. Teacher effects were computed as residual classroom achievement within schools. Teacher effects in one grade predicted achievement in following grades using quantile regression. Results consistently indicated that all…

The implementation and evaluation of the effects of a seven-period day on students and teachers, especially on student achievement, is the purpose of this study. A three-part methodology includes two applications of the Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) to teachers; administration of the School Attitude Survey (SAS) to students and teachers;…

During the 1989-90 school year, Tennessee established Project Challenge in 17 of Tennessee's poor and educationally low-performing counties. The program applied the results of Project STAR, a longitudinal experiment causally linking class size to student achievement. This paper presents findings of a study that evaluated Project Challenge by…