This issue brief focuses on one particular report, released in September 2009, that has been widely cited by charter school advocates because it appears to show remarkable results. In the report, "How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement," Stanford University professor Caroline Hoxby and her colleagues Sonali Murarka and…

Process-product research in which the investigator observes in teachers' classrooms and tries to relate process measures of teaching behavior to product measures of student outcome has face validity appeal and common sense logic. This research approach appears to be the simplest and most direct way to identify teaching behaviors which discriminate…

This paper provides practical guidance for researchers who are designing and analyzing studies that randomize schools--which comprise three levels of clustering (students in classrooms in schools)--to measure intervention effects on student academic outcomes when information on the middle level (classrooms) is missing. This situation arises…