View Research by Author - Dan Goldhaber

Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/DanGoldhaber

Considering that having a quality teacher is the foremost in-school predictor of students' success, ensuring teacher excellence is vital to the nation's educational system. In Creating a New Teaching Profession, diverse scholars assess the state of human capital development in the teaching profession today and how to progress.

Using individual teacher and student-level longitudinal data from North Carolina, this research brief presents selected findings from work examining the stability of value-added model estimates of teacher effectiveness, focusing on their implication for teacher tenure policies and making high stakes personnel decisions. Findings show year-to-year correlations in teacher effects are modest, but pre-tenure estimates of teacher job performance do predict estimated post-tenure performance in both math and reading, and would therefore seem to be a reasonable metric to use as a factor in making substantive teacher selection decisions.

This paper brings to bear new evidence from a remarkable five-year survey conducted of a census of public schools in Florida, coupled with detailed administrative data on student performance. We show that schools facing accountability pressure changed their instructional practices in meaningful ways. In addition, we present medium-run evidence of the effects of school accountability on student test scores, and find that a significant portion of these test score gains can likely be attributed to the changes in school policies and practices that we uncover in our surveys.

Most studies that have fueled alarm over the attrition and mobility rates of high-quality teachers have relied on proxy indicators of teacher quality, which recent research finds to be only weakly correlated with value-added measures of teachers' performance. We examine attrition and mobility of teachers using teacher value-added measures for early-career teachers in North Carolina public schools from 1996 to 2002. Our findings suggest that the most-effective teachers tend to stay in teaching and in specific schools. Contrary to common expectations, we do not find that more-effective teachers are more likely to leave more-challenging schools.

This paper explores the relationship between teacher testing and teacher effectiveness using a unique dataset that links teachers to their individual students. The findings show a positive relationship between some teacher licensure tests and student achievement. But they also suggest that states face significant tradeoffs when they require particular performance levels as a precondition to becoming a teacher: some teachers whom we might wish were not in the teacher workforce based on their contribution toward student achievement are eligible to teach based on their performance on these tests, while other individuals who would be effective teachers are ineligible. View the working paper PDF on CALDER's website.

This paper describes the results of a study of the relationship between teacher certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and elementary-level student achievement. Researchers examined whether NBPTS assesses the most effective applicants, whether its certification indicates teacher quality, and whether completing the NBPTS assessment process helps increase teacher effectiveness. Although the findings indicate that NBPTS identifies the more effective applicants and that National Board Certified Teachers are generally more effective than teachers who never applied to the program, the magnitude of the "NBPTS effect" differs significantly by grade level and student type. There is no evidence that the NBPTS certification process itself increases teacher effectiveness.

The A+ Accountability Plan implemented in Florida in 1999 anticipated many of the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. Notably, it contained similar attempts to invoke market forces by allowing students in failing schools to receive vouchers (a "kicker") for use at other public or private schools. Thus, Florida's school and district responses to the provisions of the A+ Plan may yield important insights into what we should expect to see elsewhere. We briefly describe publicly reported information on school performance in Florida since the inception of the A+ Plan, and then, using evidence from five school case studies, we provide a more nuanced picture of the program's effects--particularly the relationship between school accountability, grades, and the threat of vouchers. The schools chosen for our case studies straddle the extremes of the rating system (three had received A grades, and two received F grades), yet the A+ Plan appeared to significantly impact the instructional focus at each regardless. Nevertheless, it is difficult to distinguish the impact of the voucher threat from other parts of the A+ Accountability Plan. Notably, parents, teachers, and school officials report that the rating provisions exert much more social pressure, perhaps because few vouchers have been issued in Florida as of this writing. As a practical matter, however, the consequences of being labeled a failing (F) or voucher-eligible school appear to vary depending on unique conditions within each district. (Phi Delta Kappan 85(8): 598-605, April 2004.)

In this paper, we describe the results of the first large-scale study, based on a unique data set from North Carolina, assessing the relationship between the certification of teachers by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and elementary- level student achievement. Our findings indicate that NBPTS is successfully identifying the more effective teachers among applicants, and that NBPTS-certified teachers, prior to becoming certified, were more effective than their non-certified counterparts at increasing student achievement. The statistical significance and magnitude of the "NBPTS effect," however, differs significantly by grade level and student type. (Publication updated on web 4/7/05)

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) represents a major effort to elevate the field of teaching, but its certification efforts have come under fire due (in part) to a lack of consensus on the best way to improve teacher quality. This brief, part of a multistage evaluation, looks at who is applying for and gaining NBPTS certification.

National Board Certification represents one of the most significant reform efforts in the area of teacher quality in the last two decades. Since the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certified its first round of teachers in 1995, approximately 24,000 teachers have become certified at a cost to the country of well over $200 million, yet no large-scale quantitative research exists on the candidates of the program and their effectiveness in educating children. Since 1995, we have seen significant growth in NBPTS application and certification rates. In this paper, we describe the results of a study of teachers in North Carolina assessing the factors associated with the decision to apply to NBPTS and the factors associated with successful certification. We find that with all else equal, those teachers who are African-American, and/or female, score higher on standardized tests or are younger are more likely to apply for certification. With respect to NBPTS certification, we find that African-American and male teachers are less likely to be certified. Finally, we find that teachers who score higher on standardized tests are more likely to be certified.

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