Performance Evaluations

There are more than 19,000 nonprofit organizations devoted to supporting public education in the United States. These organizations include booster clubs, parent-teacher groups, public education funds, scholarship funds, high school alumni associations, and others. This report assesses the current status of education support organizations; provides details on the activities, capacities, and resources of public education funds; and compares Public Education Network member organizations with other types of education funds. On the basis of a survey of public education funds and an analysis of the latest data available from the National Center for Charitable Statistics, the report identifies key similarities and differences among the groups.

Race to the Top's prescribed models for turning around the nation's lowest-performing schools are designed for urban areas and leave rural districts out of the high-stakes money game. This omission needs to be fixed.

Using individual teacher and student-level longitudinal data from North Carolina, this research brief presents selected findings from work examining the stability of value-added model estimates of teacher effectiveness, focusing on their implication for teacher tenure policies and making high stakes personnel decisions. Findings show year-to-year correlations in teacher effects are modest, but pre-tenure estimates of teacher job performance do predict estimated post-tenure performance in both math and reading, and would therefore seem to be a reasonable metric to use as a factor in making substantive teacher selection decisions.

This paper estimates the overall extent of test measurement error and how this varies across students using New York City longitudinal data. Results reinforce the importance of accounting for measurement error, as it meaningfully increases effect size estimates associated with teacher attributes. There are important differences in teacher effectiveness that are systematically related to observed teacher attributes. Such effects are important in the formulation and implementation of personnel policies.

In debates over the best way to prepare teachers some argue that easing entry into teaching is necessary to attract strong candidates, while others argue that investing in high quality teacher preparation is most promising. Most agree that we lack a strong research basis for understanding how to prepare teachers. This paper estimates the effects of features of teachers' preparation on teachers' value-added to student test score performance in Math and English Language Arts. Results indicate variation across preparation programs in the average effectiveness of the teachers supplied to New York City schools. Preparation directly linked to practice appears to benefit first year teachers.