We analyze the effectiveness of the Programa Hondureno de Educacion Comunitaria (PROHECO) community school program in rural Honduras. The data include standardized tests and extensive information on school, teacher, classroom, and community features for 120 rural schools drawn from 15 states....

Although results from international tests may be a valid and comparable measure of knowledge acquisition up until the 8th grade (TIMSS) or until 15 years old (PISA), they are often misinterpreted as measuring the relative quality of schooling in different countries. Such interpretations are made...

We use a national Brazilian test (SAEB) and an international test (PISA) to measure whether Brazilian students 13-15 years old improved their mathematics and language learning in1995-2012. We control for part of out-of-school influences by comparing test scores for students with similar family...

Russian 8th graders score relatively high on the TIMSS mathematics test. But they perform poorly on the PISA mathematics test compared to students in Eastern and Central European countries that traditionally taught a math curriculum similar to Russia’s. In this paper, we push beneath the...

This study examines the relationship between teaching practices aimed at raising student performance on a high stakes college entrance examination — the Russian Unified State Exam (USE) — and student performance on that test. The study uses data from a school/classroom survey of almost 3,000...

Even as research has begun to document that teachers matter, there is less certainty about what attributes of teachers make the most difference in raising student achievement. Numerous studies have estimated the relationship between teachers' characteristics, such as work experience and academic...

We are in the midst of what amounts to a national experiment in how best to attract, prepare, and retain teachers, particularly for high poverty urban schools. Using data on students and teachers in grades three through eight, this study assesses the effects of pathways into teaching in New York...