Spotlight
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7/25/2008 | New brief focuses on Florida graduation rates using longitudinal methods. 7/15/2008 | New CALDER findings emerge on classroom peer effects in the Center's most recent working paper. 6/23/2008 | CALDER's teacher quality work is featured in another New York Times editorial. Find links to all CALDER-related news clippings, including recent editorials from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. NOW AVAILABLE | Listen to digital audio from CALDER's May 23rd conference on Value Added Measures.
Plain Talk with Susanna Loeb
Greater demand and higher standards for teachers has led some school districts to recruit from new prep programs, such as Teach for America. Susanna Loeb and colleagues studied the effect of these multiple paths to teaching in New York City schools.
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Recently Released Working Papers
Brief: Graduation Rates and GED Attainment in Florida
by Tim R. Sass with Steven Cartwright
This brief calculates graduation rates for the state of Florida using longitudinal data. We describe our measurement strategies and compare them with the state’s official measurement procedures. We calculate the diploma and GED attainment rates of six separate cohorts of Florida 9th graders who began high school between 1995/96 and 2000/01. We then present rates of both diploma receipt and GED receipt at four years and in later years. The results show an increasing trend in graduation rates in the state over the period studied and a substantial bump at five years, with growth flattening out after that time.
Working Paper 18
Classroom Peer Effects and Student Achievement
by Mary A. Burke and Tim R. Sass
In this paper, we analyze the impact of classroom peers on individual student performance with a unique longitudinal data set covering all Florida public school students in grades 3–10 over a five-year period. Unlike many previous data sets used to study peer effects in education, our data allow us to identify each member of a given student’s classroom peer group in elementary, middle and high school as well as the classroom teacher responsible for instruction. As a result, we can control for individual student fixed effects simultaneously with individual teacher fixed effects, thereby alleviating biases due to endogenous assignment of both peers and teachers, including some dynamic aspects of such assignments. Our estimation strategy, which focuses on the influence of peers’ fixed (observed and unobserved) characteristics on individual test score gains, also alleviates potential biases due to measurement error of peer quality, simultaneity of peer outcomes, and mean reversion. Under linear-in-means specifications, estimated peer effects are small to nonexistent, but we find some sizable and significant peer effects within nonlinear models. For example, we find that peer effects depend on an individual student’s own ability and on the ability level of the peers under consideration, results that suggest Pareto-improving redistributions of students across classrooms and/or schools. Estimated peer effects tend to be smaller when teacher fixed effects are included than when they are omitted, a result that suggests co-movement of peer and teacher quality within a student over time. We also find that peer effects tend to be stronger at the classroom level than the grade level.
Working Paper 17
Making a Difference?: The Effects of Teach for America in High School
by Zeyu Xu, Jane Hannaway, and Colin Taylor
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 fixedeffects 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 infield. Such effects exceed the impact of additional years of experience and are particularly strong in math and science.
Policy Brief 1
Value-Added Analysis and Education Policy
by Steven Rivkin
This brief describes estimation and measurement issues relevant to estimating the quality of instruction in the context of a cumulative model of learning. The discussion highlights the importance of accounting for student differences and the advantages of focusing on student achievement gains as opposed to differences in test scores.
Note: The research reported here was supported in part by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A060018 to the Urban Institute. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education, or the Urban Institute.
