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"There are several similarities between the bipartisan welfare reform movement of the 1990s and the general thrust of the education reform movement happening today. For example, there is the reliance on market-based mechanisms to "cure" longstanding problems, and the unusually strong liberal-conservative alliance of the proponents. Nevertheless, while calling education reform "the new welfare reform" might be a good soundbyte, it would also take the analogy way too far."

"Tests are a good, if not absolutely perfect way, of assessing how well students have learned (if the tests are well-designed). If you're trying to assess how a particular change in teaching works (e.g., a new math curriculum), you do need some method to assess performance. But where 'reformers' go off the rails is their incessant belief that testing is a good way to evaluate how well a teacher has taught* (this belief also seems to imply that many teachers aren't performing up to snuff, but I'll let that slide...)."

There is considerable variance in the productivity of teachers, yet educators have been unable to identify observable characteristics related to teacher effectiveness. This paper uses data from admissions records from Teach for America to explore whether information collected at the time of hire can predict student outcomes. We find that a teacher's prior achievement, leadership experience, and perseverance are associated with student gains in math. Leadership experience and commitment to the TFA mission are associated with gains in English. The TFA admissions measures are also associated with improved classroom behavior. These results suggest that teacher success can be predicted at the time of hire.

By estimating differences in long-run education and labor market outcomes for cohorts of students exposed to differing state-level primary school retention rates, this article estimates the effects of retention on all students in a cohort, retained and promoted. We find that a 1 standard deviation increase in early grade retention is associated with a 0.7 percent increase in mean male hourly wages. Further, the observed positive wage effect is not limited to the lower tail of the wage distribution but appears to persist throughout the distribution. Though there is an extensive literature attempting to estimate the effect of retention on the retained, this analysis offers what may be the first estimates of average long-run impacts of retention on all students.

The idea behind a poverty rate is that we set an income line below which people's resources are deemed insufficient for a minimally decent standard of living. The poverty rate is the share of people in households with income below that line. Because it's a binary measure, it's a crude one.

Nearly one million American youth have participated in service programs such as Peace Corps and Teach For America. This paper provides the first causal estimate of the impact of service programs on those who serve, using data from a web-based survey of former Teach For America applicants. We estimate the effect of voluntary youth service using a sharp discontinuity in the Teach For America application process. Participating in Teach For America increases racial tolerance, makes individuals more optimistic about the life chances of poor children, and makes them more likely to work in education. We argue that these facts are broadly consistent with the "Contact Hypothesis," which states that, under appropriate conditions, interpersonal contact can reduce prejudice.

"I think teacher evaluation is an extremely important issue, and I certainly have no problem with companies like LSI helping states and districts do it well. Marzano's research is a terrific foundation for teacher evaluation, because it has the potential to guide professional growth in areas identified for improvement."

We examine the link between math skills and labor-market outcomes using a resume-based field experiment.

A substantial literature documents large variation in teacher effectiveness at raising student achievement, providing motivation to identify highly effective and ineffective teachers early in their careers. Using data from New York City public schools, we estimate whether subjective evaluations of teacher effectiveness have predictive power for the achievement gains made by teachers' future students. We find that these subjective evaluations have substantial power, comparable with and complementary to objective measures of teacher effectiveness taken from a teacher's first year in the classroom.

A substantial literature documents large variation in teacher effectiveness at raising student achievement, providing motivation to identify highly effective and ineffective teachers early in their careers. Using data from New York City public schools, we estimate whether subjective evaluations of teacher effectiveness have predictive power for the achievement gains made by teachers' future students. We find that these subjective evaluations have substantial power, comparable with and complementary to objective measures of teacher effectiveness taken from a teacher's first year in the classroom.