Playworks had a significant impact on some measures of girls’ physical activity at recess, but no significant impact on measures of boys’ physical activity.

This article discusses quantitative research on homeschooling, including the available data, pitfalls of using the data, estimates of the number of homeschooled children, part-time homeschooling, and reasons why families homeschool. The author compares research on homeschooling to research on...

We outline the options available to policymakers for addressing co-teaching in a value-added model. Building on earlier work, we propose an improvement to a method of accounting for co-teaching that treats co-teachers as teams, with each teacher receiving equal credit for co-taught students.

Researchers often presume that it is better to use administrative data from grades 4 and 5 than data from grades 6 through 8 for conducting research on teacher effectiveness that uses value-added models because (1) elementary school teachers teach all subjects to their students in self-contained...

This report addresses the comparison of teacher evaluation systems and proposes ways to achieve a uniform standard for dispensing funds to districts to recognize exceptional teachers without imposing a uniform evaluation system on those districts. The report provides practical procedures to...

This article discusses the trade-offs associated with study designs that involve random assignment of students within schools and describes the experience from one such study of Teach For America (TFA). The article concludes that within-school random assignment studies such as the TFA evaluation...

This paper clarifies four areas of confusion about value-added methodology and its role in teacher evaluation: (1) use of value-added information; (2) consequences for teachers versus those for students of classifying and misclassifying teachers as effective or ineffective; (3) reliability of...

This paper clarifies four areas of confusion about value-added methodology and its role in teacher evaluation: (1) use of value-added information; (2) consequences for teachers versus those for students of classifying and misclassifying teachers as effective or ineffective; (3) reliability of...

Based on a randomized experiment to study the impact of Teach For America on student achievement and other outcomes, the authors find that TFA teachers had a positive impact on math achievement and no impact on reading achievement. The size of the impact on math achievement was about 15 percent...

This article discusses the trade-offs associated with study designs that involve random assignment of students within schools and describes the experience from one such study of Teach For America (TFA). The article concludes that within-school random assignment studies such as the TFA evaluation...