View Research by Author - Jane Hannaway

More about Jane Hannaway's areas of expertise can be found on this Urban Institute expert's page.

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

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.

This paper examines the effect of school mobility rates on the performance of different groups of students in North Carolina. We use detailed administrative data on North Carolina students and schools from 1996 to 2005 and follow four cohorts of 3rd graders for six years each. We find school mobility rates, were highest for minority and disadvantaged students, declined across successive cohorts for Hispanic students, but increased for Black students. Also, school mobility hurt the math performance of Black and Hispanic students, but not that of white students, and improved the reading performance of white and more advantaged students, but had no effect on the reading performance of minority students. “Strategic” school moves (cross-district) benefitted or had no effect on student performance, but "reactive" moves (within district) hurt all groups of students. White and Hispanic students were more likely to move to a higher quality school and Blacks students, to a lower quality school. Negative effects of school mobility increased with the number of school moves.

Testimony of CALDER Director Jane Hannaway before the D.C. City Council on the human capital initiatives of the District of Columbia's Public Schools, given January 16, 2009. Hannaway describes CALDER's work on teacher quality addressing three main findings: (1) Teachers are the most important school factor that affects student learning, and the variation in effectiveness across teachers is large; (2) The variation in teacher effectiveness is greater within schools than the variation between schools; and (3) The variation in teacher effectiveness, both within and between schools, is a management problem that begs for attention. Hannaway argues at least some of this variation is a civil rights problem that demands policy attention and urges DCPS to continue to pursue new human capital management strategies to ensure teacher quality for all students.

This paper reviews the research literature associated with the implications of performance-based accountability policies for school and teacher behaviors. It examines what is known about both possibly productive responses, such as focused effort on valued subjects, and non-productive responses, such as teaching to the test, induced by performance-based accountability systems.

U.S. public policy has increasingly been conceived, debated, and evaluated through the lenses of politics and ideology. The fundamental question--Will the policy work?--too often gets short shrift or even ignored. A remedy is evidence-based policy -- a rigorous approach that draws on careful data collection, experimentation, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine what the problem is, which ways it can be addressed, and the probable impacts of each of these ways. Examples of how evidence informs good policy and lack of evidence can invite bad include health insurance coverage, welfare reform, sentencing policy, and redress for housing discrimination.

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 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.

In this Washington Times op-ed, senior education researcher Jane Hannaway explains that few school districts and states link student test performance to individual teachers. Getting good information on teacher quality might be the most important thing for a better school system.

This chapter discusses the implementation of the school transfer and supplemental educational services (SES) options as required by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS). While M-DCPS has 22 percent of its students enrolled in school choice programs, less than one percent of eligible students use NCLB school transfer and less than twelve percent of eligible students use SES. We explore the reasoning behind these low take up rates and utilize school transfer data provided by the district to suggest that, in the case of the school transfer option, the low participation is due to a restrictive timeline for choice and the inadequate signaling power of the AYP designations.

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