Using a unique longitudinal dataset from Florida, we analyze the impact of classroom peers on individual student performance. Focusing on the influence of peers' fixed characteristics on individual test score gains, we control simultaneously for student and teacher fixed effects. We find some sizable, significant peer effects within nonlinear models, but not with linear specifications. We find peer effects depend on a student's own ability and on the ability of the peers under consideration. Peer effects tend to be smaller when teacher fixed effects are included, a result that suggests co-movement of peer and teacher quality within a student over time.

This two-guide set for evaluators and others interested in evaluation grew out of a National Science Foundation funded effort to improve cross project evaluations. Guide 1, Designing a Cross-Project Evaluation, focuses on evaluation design including identification and operationalization of program goals, building of logic models, and selection of indicators and appropriate measures for these indicators. Guide 2, Collecting and Using Data in Cross-Project Evaluation, lays out multiple issues involved in data collection, strengths and weaknesses of different data collection formats, and methods for ensuring data quality, confidentiality, and the protection of human subjects.

Teach for America (TFA) selects and places graduates from the most competitive colleges as teachers in the lowest-performing schools in the country. This paper is the first study that examines TFA effects in high school. We use rich longitudinal data from North Carolina and estimate TFA effects through cross-subject student and school fixed-effects models. We find that TFA teachers tend to have a positive effect on high school student test scores relative to non-TFA teachers, including those who are certified in-field. Such effects exceed the impact of additional years of experience and are particularly strong in math and science.

The difficult tasks for District of Columbia policymakers and education administrators, the Urban Institute's Jane Hannaway told a Senate subcommittee, are how to get more high-performing teachers in the classroom (especially classrooms serving the most disadvantaged students), how to hold teachers and schools accountable for student performance, and how to do it fairly. Reforms that promote teacher effectiveness should no doubt be tried, but reforms should be guided by data systems that provide feedback on how well the reforms are doing and how they might be fine tuned.

This paper uses administrative data for the public K-12 schools of North Carolina to measure racial segregation in the public schools of North Carolina. Using data for the 2005/06 school year, the authors update previous calculations that measure segregation in terms of unevenness in racial enrollment patterns both between schools and within schools. They find that classroom segregation generally increased between 2000/01 and 2005/06, continuing, albeit at a slightly slower rate, the trend observed over the preceding six years. Segregation increased sharply in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, which introduced a new choice plan in 2002. Over the same period, racial and economic disparities in teacher quality widened in that district.

This paper uses evidence from Durham, North Carolina to examine the impact of school choice on racial and class-based segregation across schools. The findings suggest that school choice increases segregation. Furthermore, the effects of choice on segregation by class are larger than the effects on segregation by race. These results are consistent with the theoretical argument-developed in sociology and economics literature-that the segregating choices of students from advantaged backgrounds are likely to outweigh any integrating choices by disadvantaged students.

Only 37 percent of tested students in District of Columbia Public Schools and the city's public charter schools earned proficient or advanced rankings in reading in 2007, and only 32 percent reached those levels in math, Jennifer Comey told the city council. However, between 2006 and 2007, the share of all public school students testing proficient or advanced increased. In 2007, public charter school students tested slightly higher on average compared with DCPS students.

This report presents findings from the first detailed study of Baltimore's 5 year high school reform. Using administrative data, Urban Institute researchers found that test scores and attendance rates were higher for students in Baltimore's innovation high schools than in the city's comprehensive or newly formed neighborhood high schools. Students in innovation and neighborhood schools also showed more stability in their enrollment than their counterparts in comprehensive schools. These findings remained after controlling for students' backgrounds and previous achievements even though students at innovation schools were more academically advantaged than their peers in other schools prior to entering high school.

We use data on statewide end-of-course tests in North Carolina to examine the relationship between teacher credentials and student achievement at the high school level. The availability of test scores in multiple subjects for each student permits us to estimate a model with student fixed effects, which helps minimize any bias associated with the non-random distribution of teachers and students among classrooms within schools. We find compelling evidence that teacher credentials affect student achievement in systematic ways and that the magnitudes are large enough to be policy relevant. As a result, the uneven distribution of teacher credentials by race and socio-economic status of high school students--a pattern we also document--contributes to achievement gaps in high school. View the working paper PDF on the CALDER website.

In this research we explore the how the distribution of teacher qualifications and student achievement in New York City have changed from 2000 through 2005 using data on teachers and students. We find: the gap between the qualifications of New York City teachers in high-poverty schools and low-poverty schools has narrowed substantially over this period, the gap-narrowing associated with new hires has been driven almost entirely by the substitution of teachers entering through alternative certification routes, for uncertified teachers in high-poverty schools, these changes resulted from a direct policy intervention eliminating unlicensed teachers, and perhaps most intriguing, much larger gains could result if teachers with strong teacher qualifications could be recruited. View the working paper PDF on CALDER's website.