Search

Anecdotal evidence points to the importance of school principals, but the limited existing research has neither provided consistent results nor indicated any set of essential characteristics of effective principals. This paper exploits extensive student-level panel data across six states to investigate both variations in principal performance and the relationship between effectiveness and key certification factors. While principal effectiveness varies widely across states, there is little indication that regulation of the background and training of principals yields consistently effective performance. Having prior teaching or management experience is not related to our estimates of principal value-added.

We examine the potential to expand and diversify the production of university STEM degrees by shifting the margin of initial enrollment between community colleges and 4-year universities. Our analysis is based on statewide administrative microdata from the Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development covering enrollees in all public postsecondary institutions statewide. We find that the potential for shifting the enrollment margin to expand degree production in STEM fields is modest, even at an upper bound, because most community college students are not academically prepared for bachelor's degree programs in STEM fields. We also find that shifting the enrollment margin is unlikely to improve racial/ethnic diversity among university STEM degree recipients. This is because community college students at the enrollment margin are less diverse than their peers who enter universities directly.

The recent turn toward core practices and practice-based teacher education has been accompanied by a growing literature on the definitions, pedagogies to teach, and assessments of core practices. Despite these developments, the field lacks core practices performance assessments designed to be used across course sections, courses, and subjects. This paper provides an existence proof of this type of assessment and investigates the affordances and constraints of the approach. The study describes three types of mixed-reality simulation-based performance tasks of three core practices. More than 400 novices in 64 teacher preparation programs in the United States reported that they were able to use the simulation environment and believed the tasks measure important teaching skills. Scores on the tasks were positively related to novices' prior academic and teacher education experiences. Implications for the formative use of such simulations are discussed.

Measures of student disadvantage--or risk--are critical components of equity-focused education policies. However, the risk measures used in contemporary policies have significant limitations, and despite continued advances in data infrastructure and analytic capacity, there has been little innovation in these measures for decades. We develop a new measure of student risk for use in education policies, which we call Predicted Academic Performance (PAP). PAP is a flexible, data-rich indicator that identifies students at risk of poor academic outcomes. It blends concepts from emerging "early warning" systems with principles of incentive design to balance the competing priorities of accurate risk measurement and suitability for policy use. PAP is more effective than common alternatives at identifying students who are at risk of poor academic outcomes and can be used to target resources toward these students--and students who belong to several other associated risk categories--more efficiently.

We estimate the education and earnings returns to enrolling in technical two-year degree programs at community colleges in Missouri. A unique feature of the Missouri context is the presence of a highly-regarded, nationally-ranked technical college: State Technical College of Missouri (State Tech). Compared to enrolling in a non-technical community college program, we find that enrolling in a technical program at State Tech greatly increases students' likelihoods of graduation and earnings. In contrast, there is no evidence that technical education programs at other Missouri community colleges increase graduation rates, and our estimates of the earnings impacts of these other programs are much smaller than for State Tech. Our findings exemplify the importance of institutional differences in driving the efficacy of technical education and suggest great potential for high-quality programs to improve student outcomes.

We develop a new framework for identifying at-risk students in public schools. Our framework has two fundamental advantages over "status quo" systems: (1) it is based on a clear definition of what it means for a student to be at risk and (2) it leverages states' rich administrative data systems to produce more informative risk measures. Our framework is more effective than common alternatives at identifying students who are at risk of low academic performance and we use policy simulations to show that it can be used to target resources toward these students more efficiently. It also offers several other benefits relative to "status quo" systems. We provide an alternative approach to risk measurement that states can use to inform funding, accountability, and other policies, rather than continuing to rely on broad categories tied to the nebulous concept of "disadvantage."

We use statewide administrative data from Missouri to document the prevalence of Industry Recognized Credential (IRC) programs in public high schools and understand the characteristics of students who complete IRCs. We show that 9 percent of Missouri students complete an IRC during their senior year of high school. IRC completers have lower achievement and are more likely to be disadvantaged along several measurable dimensions relative to their peers who complete analog college-ready programs, on average. Noting these average relationships, there is substantial heterogeneity among individual IRCs in terms of the types of students served: some IRCs attract students with high test scores who mostly go on to attend college, whereas others serve low-scoring students who mostly forego college. There is strong gender segregation across individual IRCs that aligns with gender segregation across occupations in the labor market.

There is empirical evidence of substantial heterogeneity in economic mobility across geographic areas and the efficacy of schools has been suggested as an explanatory factor. Using administrative microdata from seven states covering nearly 3 million students, we explore the potential role of schools in promoting economic mobility by estimating cross-district variation in "academic mobility"--a term we use to describe the extent to which students' ranks in the distribution of academic performance change during their schooling careers. We show that there exists considerable heterogeneity in academic mobility across school districts. However, after aggregating our district-level measures of academic mobility to the commuting-zone level and merging them with geographically matched external estimates of economic mobility, we find little scope for geographic differences in academic mobility to meaningfully account for differences in economic mobility.

Free and reduced-price meal eligibility (FRM) is commonly used in education research and policy applications as an indicator of student poverty. However, using multiple data sources external to the school system, we show that FRM status is a poor proxy for poverty, with eligibility rates far exceeding what would be expected based on stated income thresholds for program participation. This is true even without accounting for community eligibility for free meals, although community eligibility has exacerbated the problem in recent years. Over the course of showing the limitations of using FRM data to measure poverty, we provide promising validity evidence for a new, publicly-available measure of school poverty based on local-area family incomes.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides services to students who have disabilities. These IDEA-funded services are afforded to students between the ages of 3 and 21 who attend not only public schools (including charter schools), but also private schools. IDEA contains comprehensive guidelines on 3 processes which, by design, are meant to ensure that IDEA-funded services are granted without prejudice to any private school student who may by law be eligible to receive them. These processes IDEA refers to as "child find," "consultation," and "proportionate share." For a variety of reasons, the execution of these processes has been decidedly flawed. As a result, tens of thousands of private school students with disabilities have been denied the services to which IDEA, as a federal law, entitles them. Relying on raw data from certain public-school districts and state departments of education regarding their respective execution of the "child-find" process, the authors assess the extent to which, nationwide, private school students' (and their teachers') fair and full access to IDEA-funded services has been systemically denied. Based on this assessment, the authors offer recommendations on how, in the short-term, the current IDEA statute and regulations might be better enforced and IDEA's regulations might be improved. In view of IDEA's anticipated re-authorization, the authors also offer recommendations on how Congressionally approved statutory changes to the current law would ensure that, in the future, private school students will finally be able to freely and fully participate in IDEA.

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program that allows schools serving low-income populations to classify all students as eligible for free meals, regardless of individual circumstances. This has implications for the use of free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data to proxy for student disadvantage in education research and policy applications, which is a common practice. We document empirically how the CEP has affected the value of FRM eligibility as a proxy for student disadvantage. At the individual student level, we show that there is essentially no effect of the CEP. However, the CEP does meaningfully change the information conveyed by the share of FRM-eligible students in a school. It is this latter measure that is most relevant for policy uses of FRM data. [Portions of this paper were previously circulated under the title "Using Free Meal and Direct Certification Data to Proxy for Student Disadvantage in the Era of the Community Eligibility Provision" (ED595218). The authors have since split the original paper into two parts. This is the first part.]

We evaluate the feasibility of estimating test-score growth with a gap year in testing data, informing the scenario when state testing resumes after the 2020 COVID-19-induced test stoppage. Our research design is to simulate a gap year in testing using pre-COVID-19 data--when a true test gap did not occur--which facilitates comparisons of district- and school-level growth measures that are estimated with and without a gap year. We find that growth estimates based on the full data and gap-year data are generally similar, and our results highlight an advantage of using comprehensive growth models with rich controls for student and schooling circumstances. With the caveat that there is looming uncertainty about which students will be tested in public schools when testing resumes, and how they will be tested, our findings establish the potential for estimating useful growth measures with a gap year in testing.

We use rich administrative microdata from Missouri to examine the potential to expand and diversify the production of STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] degrees at universities by tapping into the population of community college students. We find that the scope for expansion is modest, even at an upper bound, because most community college students have academic qualifications that make them unlikely to succeed in a STEM field at a university. We also find there is almost no scope for community college students to improve the racial/ethnic diversity of four-year STEM degree recipients. We conclude that it will be challenging to expand and diversify STEM degree production at universities with interventions targeted toward community college students.

We study the effects of exposure to non-resident students on the outcomes of undergraduate in-state students during a period of high non-resident enrollment growth at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Our models leverage within-major, cross-time variation in nonresident exposure for identification. We find no evidence that increased exposure to domestic non-residents affects in-state student outcomes and our null results are precisely estimated. We find evidence of modest negative impacts on in-state students when their exposure to foreign students increases using our preferred specification. However, the identifying variation in exposure to foreign students in our data is limited and this result is not robust in all of our models.

Sixty-seven school finance reforms (SFRs) in 26 states have taken place since 1990; however, there is little empirical evidence on the heterogeneity of SFR effects. We provide a comprehensive description of how individual reforms affected resource allocation to low- and high-income districts within states, including both financial and non-financial outcomes. After summarizing the heterogeneity of individual SFR impacts, we then examine its correlates, identifying both policy and legislative/political factors. Taken together, this research aims to provide a rich description of variation in states' responses to SFRs, as well as explanation of this heterogeneity as it relates to contextual factors.

Free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data are used ubiquitously to proxy for student disadvantage in education research and policy applications. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP)--a recently-implemented policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program--allows schools serving low-income populations to identify all students as FRM-eligible regardless of individual circumstances. We study the CEP's effect on FRM eligibility as a proxy for student disadvantage, and relatedly, we examine the viability of direct certification (DC) status as an alternative disadvantage measure. Our findings on whether the CEP degrades the informational content of FRM data are mixed. At the individual level there is essentially no effect, but the CEP does meaningfully change the information conveyed by the FRM-eligible share of students in a school. Our comparison of FRM and DC data in the post-CEP era shows that these measures are similarly informative as proxies for disadvantage, despite the CEP-induced information loss in FRM data. Using both measures together can improve the identification of disadvantaged students, but only marginally.

We use statewide administrative data from Missouri to examine the explanatory power of high schools over student sorting to colleges and majors at 4-year public universities. We develop a "preparation and persistence index" (PPI) for each university-by-major cell in the Missouri system that captures dimensions of selectivity and rigor and allows for a detailed investigation of sorting. Our analysis shows that students' high schools predict the quality of the initial university, as measured by PPI, conditional on their own academic preparation, and that students from lower SES high schools systematically enroll at lower-PPI universities. However, high schools offer little explanatory power over major placements within universities.

We study the effects of access to high school math and science courses on postsecondary STEM enrollment and degree attainment using administrative microdata from Missouri. Our data panel includes over 140,000 students from 14 cohorts entering the 4-year public university system. The effects of high school course access are identified by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in course offerings within high schools over time. We find that differential access to high school courses does not affect postsecondary STEM enrollment or degree attainment. Our null results are estimated precisely enough to rule out moderate impacts.

A vast research literature is devoted to analyzing causes of and potential remedies for early-career teacher attrition. However, much less attention has been paid to late-career attrition among experienced teachers, which is driven primarily by retirement plan incentives. Although there is some variation across states, it is generally the case that late-career teachers retire at much younger ages than their professional counterparts. Moreover, given the well-documented returns to teaching experience, late-career exits are on average more costly to students in K-12 schools than early-career exits. This study uses structural estimates from a dynamic retirement model to simulate the effect of targeted retention bonuses for senior teachers rated as effective or teaching in high-need fields. While the cost per incremental year of instruction is expensive in the short run, it declines over time. Moreover, because labor supply decisions are forward-looking, a temporary bonus has much smaller effects than a permanent one. These findings highlight the value of stability in policies aimed at extending teachers' careers. Overall our results suggest that carefully-targeted retention bonuses can be useful tool in raising the quality of the teaching workforce and closing achievement gaps.

We use statewide administrative data from Missouri to examine the role of high schools in explaining students' initial college and major placements at 4-year public universities. To facilitate our investigation of postsecondary sorting, we develop a "preparation and persistence index" (PPI) for each university-by-major cell in the Missouri system to measure the quality of that cell. The PPI depends on the pre-college academic qualifications of degree completers. Our analysis of high schools shows that the high school attended predicts the quality of the initial university, as measured by PPI, conditional on a student's own academic preparation. Consistent with previous research, we further show that students from lower-SES high schools systematically enroll at lower-quality universities relative to their similarly-qualified peers from higher-SES high schools. However, high schools offer little explanatory power over major placements within universities. Correspondingly, there are not meaningful differences in the quality of these placements by high-school SES. Supplementary tables are appended.

In 2012, five foundations launched the Credit When Its Due (CWID) initiative that was "designed to encourage partnerships of community colleges and universities to significantly expand programs that award associate degrees to transfer students when the student completes the requirements for the associate degree while pursuing a bachelor's degree" (Lumina Foundation, 2012, n.p.), also known as "reverse transfer." Initially, 12 states (Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Oregon) were funded to develop and implement these reverse transfer programs and policies, and the Office of Community College Research and Leadership (OCCRL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was chosen as the research partner. In late 2013, three states (Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas) were added to bring the total number of states to 15. At least six additional states have legislation, pending legislation, or statewide initiatives related to reverse transfer. This thought paper describes changes that are occurring at the state, system, and institution levels with implementation of reverse transfer in the 12 original states. Using qualitative and quantitative data collected from the CWID Implementation Study, the authors describe efforts related to the optimization of reverse transfer in these 12 states. The authors define optimization as policy and program change at any level--state, system, or institution--that yields the largest number of students who are eligible for and able to benefit from reverse transfer. The initial results suggest that some states are piloting reverse transfer with a limited set of public community college and university partnerships, and others are striving for system-level reforms that eventually may impact all forms of transfer. Understanding what optimization means and how it works is possible because of this variation in implementation approaches among states, and this thought paper explores how states are implementing and optimizing reverse transfer.

Most public school teachers in the United States are enrolled in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Using administrative micro data from four states, combined with national pension funding data, we show these plans have accumulated substantial unfunded liabilities -- effectively debt -- owing to previous plan operations. On average across 49 state plans, an amount that exceeds 10 percent of current teachers' earnings is being set aside to pay for previously-accrued pension liabilities. To the extent that the costs of the unfunded liabilities drag on teacher compensation, they may exacerbate problems of teacher recruitment and retention. We briefly discuss three policy changes that could end or reduce the accumulation of unfunded liabilities in educator pension plans: (1) transition teachers to defined-contribution retirement plans; (2) transition teachers to cash-balance retirement plans; and (3) tighten the link between funding and benefit formulas within the current defined-benefit structure.

Rising costs of public employee pension plans are a source of fiscal stress in many cities and states and have led to calls for reform. To assess the economic consequences of plan changes it is important to have reliable statistical models of employee retirement behavior. The authors estimate a structural model of teacher retirement using administrative panel data. A Stock-Wise option value model provides a good fit to the data and predicts well out-of-sample on the effects of pension enhancements during the 1990s. The structural model is used to simulate the effect of alternatives to the current defined benefit plan.

We use data from workers in the largest public-sector occupation in the United States -- teaching -- to examine the effect of pension enhancements on employee retention. Specifically, we study a 1999 enhancement to the benefit formula for public school teachers in St. Louis that resulted in an immediate and dramatic increase in their incentives to remain in covered employment. To identify the effect of the enhancement on teacher retention, we leverage the fact that the strength of the incentive increase varied across the workforce depending on how far teachers were from retirement eligibility when it was enacted. Although we document substantial differences across teachers in how their retention incentives were affected by the enhancement, our results indicate that these differences did not translate into meaningful changes in behavior. The following are appended: (1) Pension-Wealth Calculation Details; (2) Supplementary Tables; and (3) Using a Cost-Benefit Framework to Gain Insight about Novice Teachers.

When Congress reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), much of the debate will undoubtedly focus on the accountability requirements added to Title I by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). Title I authorizes federal aid to school districts to educate low-achieving children in low-income areas. Among the most controversial of these NCLB requirements are the provisions for determining whether schools and districts have made adequate yearly progress (AYP) in raising student achievement in reading and mathematics. This background paper from the Center on Education Policy (CEP) explores some of the factors that have influenced recent trends in the national percentage of public schools that have not made AYP, out of the total number of schools that reported AYP results. This paper is intended to serve as a companion to the report, "Update with 2009-10 Data and Five-Year Trends: How Many Schools Have Not Made Adequate Yearly Progress?" (CEP, 2011). As discussed in more detail in that five-year trend report, the national percentage of public schools failing to make AYP rose from 29% in 2006 to an estimated 38% in 2010 and actually decreased in two of the interim years. Although 38% is a record high percentage of schools not making AYP, it is still lower than what many observers had predicted by this point in NCLB implementation. CEP's analysis focused on 10 large or medium-sized states that had the greatest increases or decreases in the number of schools not making AYP or had other noteworthy AYP trends: California, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Washington. Its analysis revealed several factors, in addition to changes in student learning, that appear to account for some of the fluctuations in the national percentage of schools not making AYP and may help explain why these percentages have not escalated as quickly as some analysts have predicted. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) National trends in the percentage of schools not making AYP have been affected disproportionately by trends in a limited subset of states; (2) Changes in state testing policies have slowed, or even reversed, increases in the number of schools failing to make AYP in several states; (3) The NCLB "safe harbor" provision has also helped somewhat in keeping down the share of schools failing to make AYP in certain states; (4) The use of growth models appears to have had a limited impact on AYP trends in most of the growth model states analyzed; (5) In most of the states analyzed, the number of schools failing to make AYP increased substantially in the years when the state's achievement targets went up; (6) States that introduced new tests saw substantial short-term increases or decreases in the number of schools failing to make AYP; (7) In some states, changes in the number of schools not making AYP are largely attributable to changes in the cut scores defining "proficient" performance on state tests; (8) North Carolina's experience suggests that counting proficient scores from retests can reduce the number of schools failing to make AYP--especially in the short term; and (9) Even if most or all states adopt common standards and common assessments, variations in state accountability policies could continue to make it impossible to arrive at meaningful comparisons about the performance of different states. (Contains 6 footnotes.) [For the companion report, "Update with 2009-10 Data and Five-Year Trends: How Many Schools Have Not Made Adequate Yearly Progress?," see ED518993.]

This paper examines late career mobility and retirement decisions for a cohort of mid-career Missouri public school teachers. Specifically, the paper follows a cohort of teachers whose combined age and experience totaled 45 or more years in fall 1991 through the 2005-06 school year. Like many public employee pensions, Missouri has a system that permits teachers to receive full benefits if the sum of their age and experience is at least 80 ("rule of 80"). Thus, the sum of age and experience for most of the teachers in this cohort will hit 80--full retirement eligibility--in the 16-year window studied. Traditional benefit (DB) pension systems provide teachers with a large annuity value on retirement. The accrual of this annuity value occurs over the teacher's entire work life; however, the rate of accrual is highly nonlinear and back-loaded with most of the gain occurring in the final years prior to retirement. In addition, these pension systems have various rules that introduce kinks or discontinuities in the rate of accrual after 30 years. This paper explores the effect of these pension rules on retirement patterns, as well as general descriptive data on retirement patterns. Like many states, Missouri permits teachers to continue teaching part-time while collecting benefits (e.g., DROP plans). Teachers can also retire from one pension system and begin teaching in another. The paper examines both types of behavior. The primary source of data for this study is administrative teacher records maintained by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. These records include data on teacher experience, demographics, teaching field, compensation, retirement, and workforce exit, as well as the employing school and district. The paper also compares teacher retirement data from the Missouri administrative records with data from the 2000-01 Teacher Follow-up Survey. (Contains 16 figures, 1 table and 12 footnotes.)

The specifics of how growth models should be constructed and used to evaluate schools and teachers is a topic of lively policy debate in states and school districts nationwide. In this paper we take up the question of model choice and examine three competing approaches. The first approach, reflected in the popular student growth percentiles (SGPs) framework, eschews all controls for student covariates and schooling environments. The second approach, typically associated with value-added models (VAMs), controls for student background characteristics and aims to identify the causal effects of schools and teachers. The third approach, also VAM-based, fully levels the playing field so that the correlation between school- and teacher-level growth measures and student demographics is essentially zero. We argue that the third approach is the most desirable for use in educational evaluation systems. Our case rests on personnel economics, incentive-design theory, and the potential role that growth measures can play in improving instruction in K-12 schools. Data Description is appended. (Contains 4 tables, 3 figures and 23 footnotes.)

Teacher pension systems target retirements within a narrow range of the career cycle by penalizing individuals who separate too soon or remain employed too long. The penalties result in the retention of some teachers who would otherwise choose to leave, and the premature exit of some teachers who would otherwise choose to stay. We examine how the effects of teachers' pension incentives on workforce composition influence teacher quality. Teachers who are held in by the "pull" incentives in the pension systems are not more effective, on average, than the typical teacher. Teachers who are encouraged to exit by the "push" incentives are more effective on average. We conclude that the net effect of teachers' pension incentives on workforce quality is small, but negative. Given the substantial and growing costs of current systems, and the lack of evidence regarding their efficacy, experimentation by traditional and charter schools with alternative retirement benefit structures would be useful. Appended are: (1) Pension-Wealth Calculations; and (2) Supplementary Tables. (Contains 10 tables, 1 figure and 28 footnotes.) [Additional funding for this paper was provided by the DC State Office of the Superintendent.]

During the late 1990s public pension funds across the United States accrued large actuarial surpluses. The seemingly flush conditions of the pension funds led legislators in most states to substantially improve retirement benefits for public workers, including teachers. In this study we examine the benefit enhancements to the teacher pension system in Missouri. These enhancements resulted in large windfall gains for teachers who were close to retirement when the legislation was enacted. By contrast, novice teachers, and teachers who had not yet entered the labor force, were made "worse off". The reason is that front-end contribution rates have been raised for current teachers to offset past liabilities accrued from the enhancements. Other things equal, the teaching profession in Missouri is now less appealing for young teachers than it was before the pension enhancements were enacted. Pension-Wealth Calculations are appended. (Contains 2 figures, 7 tables and 31 footnotes.)

Educators in public schools in the United States are typically enrolled in defined-benefit pension plans, which penalize across-plan mobility. We use administrative data from Missouri to examine how the mobility penalties affect the labor market for school leaders, and show that pension borders greatly reduce leadership flows across schools. Our most conservative estimates indicate that removing a pension border that divides two groups of schools will increase leadership flows between the groups by roughly 100 percent. We consider the implications of our findings for workforce quality in schools near pension borders in Missouri. Our results are of general interest given that thousands of public schools operate near pension boundaries nationwide. Appended are: (1) Details for the Pension-Wealth Calculations; (2) Procedure for Determining the Effective Number of Simulations; and (3) Supplementary Tables. (Contains 6 figures, 12 tables and 45 footnotes.)

Over the past three decades policymakers have been seeking new ways to secure improved performance from higher education institutions. One popular approach has been performance funding, which involves use of a formula to tie funding to institutional performance on specified indicators. This report reviews findings from studies on performance funding programs in a multitude of states. The studies suggest that tying funding to outputs has immediate impacts on colleges in the form of changes in funding, greater awareness by institutions of state priorities and of their own institutional performance, and increased status competition among institutions. Because of these immediate impacts, performance funding produces intermediate institutional changes in the form of greater use of data in institutional planning and policymaking and in changes in academic and student service policies and practices that promise to improve student outcomes. However, claims that performance funding does indeed increase ultimate outcomes--in the form of improved rates of retention, completion of developmental education, and graduation--are not validated by solid data. In the face of this finding, this report identifies obstacles to the effective functioning of performance funding, as well as unintended impacts. The report closes by providing recommendations for overcoming the many obstacles to the effective functioning of performance funding and addressing the unintended impacts documented by the studies reviewed. (Contains 40 footnotes.)

While it is generally understood that defined benefit pension systems concentrate benefits on career teachers and impose costs on mobile teachers, there has been very little analysis of the magnitude of these effects. The authors develop a measure of implicit redistribution of pension wealth among teachers at varying ages of separation. Compared to a neutral system, often about half of an entering cohort's net pension wealth is redistributed to teachers who separate in their fifties from those who separate earlier. There is some variation across six state systems. This implies large costs for interstate mobility. Estimates show teachers who split a thirty-year career between two pension plans often lose over half their net pension wealth compared to teachers who complete a career in a single system. Plan options that permit purchases of service years mitigate few or none of these losses. It is difficult to explain these patterns of costs and benefits on efficiency grounds. More likely explanations include the relative influence of senior versus junior educators in interest group politics and a coordination problem between states. (Contains 7 tables, 16 figures, and 40 footnotes.)

Defined Benefit pension plans often generate odd time patterns of benefits. One typical pattern exhibits low accrual in early years, accelerating in mid-late years, followed by dramatic decline, or even negative returns in years that are relatively young for retirement. We consider four states for specific analysis: Arkansas, Missouri, California and Massachusetts. There are interesting variations among these states' formulas, which affect the incentive to retire early. We identify key factors in the defined benefit formulas that drive such patterns and likely consequences for employee behavior. We examine the efficiency and equity consequences of these systems and lessons that might be drawn for pension reform. (Contains 1 table, 2 figures and 18 footnotes.)

The school-to-work transition of high school and community college vocational program completers in 1990-1992 was examined by analyzing administrative records and employment and earnings data of vocational program completers from state education agencies in Colorado, Florida, Missouri, and Washington. A consistently high percentage of vocational program completers at both the high school and postsecondary levels continued an uninterrupted affiliation with the same employer during the bridge period encompassing their last months in school and first few months after leaving school; however, substantial movement between/among employers during the first years after the former students left school was observed. Former students who continued with the same employer through the bridge period were consistently found to have higher earnings than their classmates while they were still in school, shortly after leaving school, and at the end of the postschool reference period. It was concluded that knowledge about a former student's occupational assignment within a place of employment is not needed to predict that employee's earnings; rather, awareness of the person's industry affiliation is an acceptable substitute for that purpose. (Forty tables/figures and 86 endnotes are included. Appended are additional information on the wage-record components examined and calculation of a full-time earnings threshold amount.) (MN)

Care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRISs) have advanced and matured, a number of states and localities have undertaken evaluations to validate the systems. Such efforts stem from the desire to ensure that the system is designed and operating in the ways envisioned when the system was established. Given that a central component in a QRIS is the rating system, a key concern is whether the rating process, including the use of particular measures and the manner in which they are combined and cut scores are applied, produces accurate and understandable ratings that capture meaningful differences in program quality across rating levels. The aim of this paper is to review the set of studies that seek to validate QRIS rating systems in one of several ways: by examining the relationship between program ratings and objective measures of program quality; by determining if program ratings increase over time; and by estimating the relationship between program ratings and child developmental outcomes. Specifically, we review 14 such validation studies that address one or more of these three questions. Together, these 14 studies cover 12 QRISs in 11 states or substate areas: Colorado, Florida (two counties), Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia. In reviewing the literature, we are interested in the methods and measures they employ, as well as the empirical results. To date, most validation studies have found that programs with higher ratings had higher environment rating scores (ERSs), but the ERS is often one of the rating elements. Independent measures of quality have not always shown the expected positive relationship with quality. The handful of studies that have examined how ratings change over time have generally shown that programs participating in the QRIS did improve their quality or quality ratings. Studies that examine the relationship between QRIS ratings and child development are the most challenging to implement and can be costly to conduct when independent child assessments are performed. Consequently, there has been considerable variation in methods to date across these studies. Among the four studies with the stronger designs, two found the expected relationship between QRIS ratings and child developmental gains. The lack of robust findings across these studies indicate that QRISs, as currently configured, do not necessarily capture differences in program quality that are predictive of gains in key developmental domains. Based on these findings, the paper discusses the opportunities for future QRIS validation studies, including those conducted as part of the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge grants, to advance the methods used and contribute not only to improvement of the QRIS in any given state, but also to add to the knowledge base about effective systems more generally. [This report was prepared for the Delaware Office of Early Learning.]