Denver Public Schools utilizes one of the nation's highest profile alternative teacher compensation systems, and a key element of Denver's Professional Compensation System for Teachers (ProComp) is pay for performance. This study analyzes the student achievement implications of ProComp utilizing...

While numerous recent authors have studied the effects of school accountability systems on student test performance and school “gaming” of accountability incentives, there has been little attention paid to substantive changes in instructional policies and practices resulting from school...

A large literature on teacher collective bargaining describes the potential influence of the provisions in collectively bargained teacher union contracts on teachers and student achievement, but little is known about what influences the provisions that end up in these contracts. Using a unique...

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 paper examines the mobility of early-career teachers of varying quality—measured using value-added methods—and focuses on the variation in these effects across the effectiveness distribution. On average, more effective teachers remain in the profession and stay in their...

Education Week commentary.

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...

In an influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) shows that standard value-added models (VAMs) suggest implausible and large future teacher effects on past student achievement. This is the basis of a falsification test that appears to indicate bias in typical VAM estimates of teacher...