The most sweeping federal education law in decades, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, requires states to administer standardized exams and to punish schools that do not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the fraction of students passing these exams. While the literature on school...

Mentoring has become an extremely popular policy for improving the retention and performance of new teachers, but we know little about its effects on teacher and student outcomes. I study the impact of mentoring in New York City, which adopted a nationally recognized mentoring program in 2004. I...

In this paper, we show that the design and decentralized, school-based scoring of New York's high school exit exams – the Regents Examinations – led to the systematic manipulation of test sores just below important proficiency cutoffs. Our estimates suggest that teachers inflate...

In this paper, we measure the extent to which subjective and objective evaluations of new teachers in New York City can predict their future impacts on student achievement. Specifically, we examine evaluations of applicants to an alternative certification program, evaluations of new teachers by...

I examine the impact of a property tax relief program in New York State that lowered the marginal cost of school expenditure to homeowners. I find that a typical school district, which received 20% of its revenue through the program in the school year 2001–2002, raised expenditure by 4.1% and...

We examine the implications of separating students of different grade levels across schools for the purposes of educational production. Specifically, we find that moving students from elementary to middle school in 6th or 7th grade causes significant drops in academic achievement. These effects...

Teaching may be the most-scrutinized occupation in the economy. Over the past four decades, empirical researchers — many of them economists — have accumulated an impressive amount of evidence on teachers: the heterogeneity in teacher productivity, the rise in productivity associated with...

In November of 2007, the New York City Department of Education assigned each elementary and middle school a letter grade (A to F) as part of a new accountability system. Grades were based on continuous numeric scores derived from levels and changes in student achievement and other school...