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New York City's universal pre-kindergarten program, which increased full-day enrollment from 19,000 to almost 70,000 children, is ambitious in both scale and implementation speed. We provide new evidence on the distribution of pre-K quality in NYC by student race/ethnicity, and investigate the extent to which observed differences are associated with the spatial distribution of higher-quality providers. Relative to other jurisdictions, we find the average quality of public pre-K providers is high. However, we identify large disparities in the average quality of providers experienced by black and white students, which is partially explained by differential proximity to higher-quality providers. Taken together, current racial disparities in the quality of pre-K providers may limit the program's ability to reduce racial achievement gaps.

Participation in the federally-subsidized school breakfast program often falls well below its lunchtime counterpart. To increase take-up, many districts have implemented Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC), offering breakfast directly to students at the start of the school day. Beyond increasing participation, advocates claim BIC improves academic performance, attendance, and engagement. Others caution BIC has deleterious effects on child weight. We use the implementation of BIC in NYC to estimate its impact on meals program participation, BMI, achievement, and attendance. While we find large effects on participation, our findings provide no evidence of hoped-for gains in academic performance, nor of feared increases in obesity. The policy case for BIC will depend upon reductions in hunger and food insecurity for disadvantaged children, or its longer-term effects. The following are appended: (1) Mean Annual Breakfast and Lunch Participation Rates: Balanced Panel of Elementary and Middle School; (2) Impact of BIC adoption on meals program participation, 2001-2012--models using school specific linear time trends; (3) Impact of BIC on obesity and BMI--using grade-specific BIC treatment; (4) Impact of BIC on ELA and math achievement--using grade-specific BIC treatment; (5) Impact of BIC on obesity and BMI--using percent of BIC classrooms treatment; and (6) Impact of BIC on ELA and math achievement--using percent of BIC classrooms treatment.

The growing availability of data linking students to classroom teachers has made it possible to estimate the contribution teachers make to student achievement. While there is a growing consensus that teacher quality is important and current evaluation systems are inadequate, many have expressed concerns over the use of value-added measures (VAMs) in high-stakes personnel decisions. We conduct a new test of the validity of teacher value-added models. We apply traditionally estimated VAM models to an outcome that teachers cannot plausibly have a causal effect on: student height. Any estimated "effect" of teachers on height should raise questions about the extent to which VAMs cleanly distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers. We also examine two potential interpretations for effects of teachers on height. The first is that these effects reflect bias, sorting to teachers on the basis of unobserved factors related to height (that may or may not be related to achievement). The second is that these effects reflect measurement error or other forms of random "noise." Both have implications for the use of VAMs in practice. The findings raise important questions about the extent to which VAMs cleanly distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers. This is especially important when personnel and compensation decisions are tied to individual VAM estimates.

Estimates of teacher "value-added" suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the validity of value-added models. Using administrative student data from New York City, we apply commonly estimated value-added models to an outcome teachers cannot plausibly affect: student height. We find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and reading achievement, raising obvious questions about validity. Subsequent analysis finds these "effects" are largely spurious variation (noise), rather than bias resulting from sorting on unobserved factors related to achievement. Given the difficulty of differentiating signal from noise in real-world teacher effect estimates, this paper serves as a cautionary tale for their use in practice.

School choice policies, a fixture of efforts to improve public education in many cities, aim to enable families to choose a school that they believe will best meet their child's needs. In New York City (NYC), choice and the development of a diverse portfolio of options have played central roles in the Department of Education's high school reform efforts. This report examines the choices and placements of New York City's lowest-achieving students: those scoring among the bottom 20 percent on standardized state tests in middle school. Focusing on data from 2007 to 2011, the report looks at who these low-achieving students are, including how their demographics compare to other students in NYC, the educational challenges they face, and where they live. The bulk of the report reviews low-achieving students' most preferred schools and the ones to which they were ultimately assigned, assessing how these schools compare to those of their higher-achieving peers. The findings show that low-achieving students attended schools that were lower performing, on average, than those of all other students. This was driven by differences in students' initial choices: low-achieving students' first-choice schools were less selective, lower-performing, and more disadvantaged. Overall, lower-achieving and higher-achieving students were matched to their top choices at the same rate. Importantly, both low- and higher-achieving students appear to prefer schools that are close to home, suggesting that differences in students' choices likely reflect, at least in part, the fact that lower-achieving students are highly concentrated in poor neighborhoods, where options may be more limited. Two appendixes present: (1) The Shrinking Pool of Level 1 and Level 2 Students; and (2) Supplemental Tables and Figures. (Contains 30 endnotes, 26 figures, and 6 tables.)

In a pioneering effort to improve school accountability and move it beyond a simple recitation of high-stakes test scores, New York City developed the Progress Report (PR), a set of metrics that includes the overall "A" through "F" letter grade that the Department of Education (DOE) began issuing annually to most public schools beginning in 2007. In 2011, in an effort to gain a better understanding of New York City's accountability system, New Visions for Public Schools was commissioned to assess various components of the high school PR. The result, "Unlocking New York City's High School Progress Report," represents the most comprehensive analysis of the PR to date. The study attempts to explore how the PR's methodology can more accurately assess the impact that each of New York City's more than 400 high schools has on the diverse student population it serves. This study clarifies not only the impact of the current version of the PR, but also points to several key revisions that can improve the PR (specifically, the Peer Index's methodology) to increase its accuracy. This report contributes important insights into the broader conversation about how to improve New York City's accountability system.

This paper reports the results of a large, school-level randomized controlled trial evaluating a set of three informational interventions for young people choosing high schools in 473 middle schools, serving over 115,000 8th graders. The interventions differed in their level of customization to the student and their mode of delivery (paper or online); all treated schools received identical materials to scaffold the decision-making process. Every intervention reduced likelihood of application to and enrollment in schools with graduation rates below the city median (75 percent). An important channel is their effect on reducing nonoptimal first choice application strategies. Providing a simplified, middle-school specific list of relatively high graduation rate schools had the largest impacts, causing students to enroll in high schools with 1.5-percentage point higher graduation rates. Providing the same information online, however, did not alter students' choices or enrollment. This appears to be due to low utilization. Online interventions with individual customization, including a recommendation tool and search engine, induced students to enroll in high schools with 1-percentage point higher graduation rates, but with more variance in impact. Together, these results show that successful informational interventions must generate engagement with the material, and this is possible through multiple channels. [Funding for this report was provided by the Heckscher Foundation for Children and the NYU Institute for Human Development and Social Change.]

In the education world, the existence of funding inequities has long been a known fact, but the sources of these inequities have not always been obvious. Typically, local property tax variation has been blamed as the sole, or at least primary, cause of inequalities and called for greater state funding as the solution. In practice, however, it is seen that states providing a large share of state aid are not necessarily more equitable in their distribution of school funding. There must therefore be more to the story behind funding inequities. This report tries to provide a fuller picture of the problem so that more is known about what stands in the way of equity. The two chapters that follow explore stealth inequities in school finance, which are defined as often-overlooked features of school funding systems that tend to exacerbate inequities in per-pupil spending rather than reduce them, and that do so in a way that favors communities with the least need. This report begins by identifying those states where combined state and local revenues are systematically lower in higher-poverty districts--that is, states with "regressive" school funding distributions. Based on this analysis, the authors focus on six states--Illinois, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and North Carolina--where children attending school in higher-poverty districts still have substantially less access to state and local revenue than children attending school in lower-poverty districts. With these states in mind, the authors then go beyond recent reports on school funding inequities to uncover some nontraditional causes of these imbalances. The first chapter, "How State Aid Formulas Undermine Educational Equity in States," written by Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker, explores how state aid formulas--often designed to promote equity and adequacy--can work against their own stated objectives. In the second chapter, "The Role of Local Revenues in Funding Disparities Across School Districts," written by New York University associate professor Sean P. Corcoran, takes a closer look at the role local revenues play in resource disparities across low- and high-poverty school districts. Appended are: (1) Data compiled for identification model; and (2) Decomposition of inequality in local revenues, by state. (Contains 25 figures, 21 tables and 94 endnotes.)

On August 9, 2012, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) convened a meeting of researchers and U.S. Department of Education (ED) and IES staff to discuss recent advances in measuring teacher effectiveness. The objectives of the meeting were to: (1) Identify and discuss recent advances in the use of value-added models (VAMs) and student growth models (SGMs) as one measure of teacher effectiveness, including their implications, applications, and limitations for practicing educators; and (2) Identify considerations for future research. Participants from the research community were carefully chosen to represent a broad range of academic disciplines, expertise and perspectives. Each participant from the research community was asked to share in advance of the meeting a two-page written summary of their views on the implications of recent advances in value-added and SGM measures. These briefs are presented here. (Individual briefs contain references.) [For the meeting summary, see ED539039.]

This paper estimates the impact of attending a preferred high school on mediating factors of student success, including engagement, behavior, and attendance. For example, the authors ask whether students are more engaged with their school or have higher attendance when successfully matched to their first choice versus their second (or lower) choice. By focusing on the subset of incoming freshman who are assigned at random to their preferred school by the HSAPS mechanism (cases of oversubscription), they provide a plausibly causal estimate of the impact of attending a preferred school on these factors. In addition to estimating the average impact across all students, they explore heterogeneity in treatment effects across student populations of interest (e.g. economically disadvantaged, ELL, and low, middle, and high-achieving students). (Contains 2 tables.)

Effective teachers are demonstrably the most important resource schools have for improving the academic success of their students. Yet for many school leaders, recruiting and retaining talented and effective classroom teachers remains an uphill battle. Whether teacher salaries are sufficient to attract the best graduates into teaching remains an open question, but there is little doubt that the recent fiscal crisis in the states has reenergized the debate over teacher compensation. As this debate proceeds, sound evidence on the comparability of teacher pay is critical for maintaining and improving the quality of the teaching force in the United States. In this issue brief, the authors summarize the main findings of their 2004 and 2008 reports, and update key estimates of the teacher pay penalty through 2010. Using data aggregated over the 2006-10 period (to ensure a sufficient sample size in all 50 states and the District of Columbia), they computed the weekly wages of public school teachers relative to comparably educated workers. Some of their findings are the following: (1) Trends in weekly earnings show that public school teachers in 2010 earned about 12% less than comparable workers, a gap equivalent to that found in their 2004 study; (2) Analyzing the weekly earnings of occupations comparable to K-12 teachers confirms the substantial erosion of teacher pay relative to their peers through 2006; and (3) If the policy goal is to improve the quality of the entire teaching workforce, then raising the "level" of teacher compensation is critical to recruiting and retaining higher quality teachers. (Contains 2 tables.)

The authors use data from the Houston Independent School District to estimate teacher effects on two different academic tests of the same subject areas, administered in the same school year to the same students at approximately the same time of year. The first is the statewide "high-stakes" test administered as part of the Texas accountability system, while the second is a nationally-normed "low-stakes" test, intended as both an audit test and as a grade promotion tool. The authors focus on achievement in reading and math in the 4th and 5th grade. Given these two effectiveness measures, the authors address the following questions: (1) Do these estimates of teacher effectiveness suggest a similar level of variation in quality across teachers?; (2) How strongly are these two measures correlated? Is it the case that teachers who appear effective on a "high-stakes" state test are similarly effective on a "low-stakes" test of the same subject?; (3) Is one measure of teacher effectiveness more stable from year to year than the other?; (4) Are there differences in decay rates in teacher effects on high- and low-stakes tests?; and (5) To what extent does the high- and low-stakes nature of the test contribute to these differences? For this paper the authors drew from a longitudinal dataset of all students tested in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) between 1998 and 2006, approximately 165,000 per year. The authors' results indicate that teacher effects on the "high"-stakes test vary substantially more than those in the same subject on the low-stakes test. For the Texas state assessments (TAAS/TAKS), they find a standard deviation in teacher quality of 0.23 in reading and 0.28 in math. In contrast, the standard deviation is nearly half this size on the Stanford: 0.13 and 0.15, respectively. Teacher effects on different tests of the same subject in the same year are only modestly correlated, at 0.61 in math and 0.52 in reading. Figure 2 expresses this correlation another way, showing the proportion of teachers in each quintile of effectiveness on one test that ranked in quintiles 1-5 on the second test. As an illustration, they find only 48 percent of teachers in the top quintile of the TAKS math test were also in the top quintile of the Stanford test. A non-trivial share (13%) ranked among the "lowest" two quintiles of the Stanford. They find very little difference across the two tests in inter-temporal stability. Perhaps more importantly, they find that teacher effects on the high-stakes TAKS test decay at a much faster rate than those on the low-stakes Stanford test. Using the method proposed by Jacob, Lefgren, and Sims (forthcoming), they estimated the persistence of teacher-induced gains on achievement in later grades and found that 34% of a teacher's effect on grade 4 mathematics carried through to grade 5, as measured by the Stanford test, while only 16% of her effect on achievement persisted as measured on the high-stakes TAKS test. The corresponding numbers in reading were 31% and 20%. Finally, they find important differences in the impact of teacher observables on student performance across the two tests. The returns to teacher experience are compressed on the high-stakes test, such that the majority of the returns occur in the first 2 to 3 years. In contrast, they find positive returns to experience on the low-stakes reading test throughout the first 15 years of teachers' careers. (Contains 2 figures.)

Value-added measures of teacher effectiveness are the centerpiece of a national movement to evaluate, promote, compensate, and dismiss teachers based in part on their students' test results. Federal, state, and local policy-makers have adopted these methods en masse in recent years in an attempt to objectively quantify teaching effectiveness and promote and retain teachers with a demonstrated record of success. Attention to the quality of the teaching force makes a great deal of sense. No other school resource is so directly and intensely focused on student learning, and research has found that teachers can and do vary widely in their effectiveness (e.g., Rivkin, Hanushek & Kain 2005; Nye, Konstantopoulos & Hedges 2004; Kane, Rockoff & Staiger 2008). Furthermore, teacher quality has been found to vary across schools in a way that systematically disadvantages poor, low-achieving, and racially isolated schools (e.g., Clotfelter, Ladd & Vigdor 2005; Lankford, Loeb & Wyckoff 2002; Boyd et al. 2008). But questions remain as to whether value-added measures are a valid and appropriate tool for identifying and enhancing teacher effectiveness. In this report, the author aims to provide an accessible introduction to these new measures of teaching quality and puts them into the broader context of concerns over school quality and achievement gaps. Using New York City's Teacher Data Initiative and Houston's ASPIRE (Accelerating Student Progress, Increasing Results & Expectations) program as case studies, the author assesses the potential for these measures to improve outcomes in urban school systems. In doing so, he outlines some of the most important challenges facing value-added measures in practice. Appended are: (1) Race to the Top Definitions of Teacher Effectiveness and Student Achievement; (2) Sample New York City Teacher Data Report, 2010; and (3) Sample New York City Teacher Data Report, 2009. (Contains 10 figures and 30 footnotes.) [For "Can Teachers Be Evaluated by Their Students' Test Scores? Should They Be? The Use of Value-Added Measures of Teacher Effectiveness in Policy and Practice. Executive Summary. Education Policy for Action Series," see ED522164.]

"Value-added" measures of teacher effectiveness are the centerpiece of a national movement to evaluate, promote, compensate, and dismiss teachers based in part on their students' test results. Federal, state, and local policy-makers have embraced these measures in recent years as a means to objectively quantify teacher quality and to identify, reward, and retain teachers with a demonstrated record of success. Few can deny the intuitive appeal of value-added assessment: if a statistical model can isolate a teacher's unique effect on achievement, the possibilities seem endless. Teacher quality is an immensely important resource, and research has found that teachers can and do vary widely in their effectiveness (e.g., Kane, Rockoff & Staiger 2008). Common measures of teacher qualifications, such as experience and college selectivity, typically provide minimal information about individual teachers' effectiveness. Value-added holds out the promise that the elusive concept of "teacher quality" can be objectively and precisely measured. However, these tools have limitations and shortcomings that are not always apparent to interested stakeholders--including teachers, principals, and policy-makers--or even to value-added advocates. In the report this executive summary is based on, the author provides an introduction to these new measures of teaching effectiveness; describes prominent value-added systems currently in use in New York City and Houston; assesses the potential for value-added measurement to improve student outcomes, using these programs as empirical case studies; and outlines some important challenges facing their implementation in practice. This executive summary summarizes these concepts and findings. [For the full report, "Can Teachers Be Evaluated by Their Students' Test Scores? Should They Be? The Use of Value-Added Measures of Teacher Effectiveness in Policy and Practice. Education Policy for Action Series," see ED522163.]

Many U.S. states provide public funding for charter schools--deregulated and privately managed schools operating in direct competition with government-run schools. While the impact of charter schools on student achievement and sorting has been intensely studied, less is known about the demand for these alternatives. Using precinct-level returns from three ballot referenda in Washington State, we assess the relative importance of school quality and community characteristics in explaining voter support for charter schools. We find that low student achievement predicts greater charter support across school districts, but is relatively unimportant in explaining variation across precincts within districts. Residents of districts with more highly qualified teachers and greater local spending were less likely to favor charters, as were districts with high teacher union membership. The strongest predictor at all levels was political partisanship: areas with more Republican voters were strongly and consistently more likely to vote in favor of charter schools. An appendix provides: Descriptive statistics, Washington school districts and King County precincts (table).

New York City's specialized high schools have a long history of offering a rigorous, college preparatory, public education to some of NYC's highest-achieving students. Despite enrolling only a small fraction of the City's high school students, the specialized schools have become a powerful symbol in a larger public debate about educational equity. Critics argue that this problem stems, at least in part, from the specialized schools' exclusive use of the "Specialized High School Admissions Test" (SHSAT) to determine admission. While supporters of the test insist that it is essential for maintaining the schools' high academic standards--highlighting its objectivity, as well as its emphasis on logic and advanced abilities in math and English--there is little question that the students who are admitted based on the SHSAT do not look like NYC public schools as a whole. This brief begins to answer these arguments by examining the pathway from middle school to matriculation at a specialized high school by exploring differences in rates of application, admission, and enrollment--highlighting opportunities to improve access for under-represented groups. The brief also simulates the effects of various alternative admissions rules, which allows for examining how the use of criteria other than the SHSAT might alter the composition of the specialized schools. [For the working paper: "Pathways to an Elite Education: Application, Admission, and Matriculation to New York City's Specialized High Schools," see ED559679.]

New York City's elite public specialized high schools have a long history of offering a rigorous college preparatory education to the City's most academically talented students. Though immensely popular and highly selective, their policy of admitting students on the basis of a single entrance exam has been heavily criticized. Many argue, for example, that the policy inhibits diversity at the schools, which are predominately Asian, White, and male. In this paper, we provide a descriptive analysis of the "pipeline" from middle school to matriculation at a specialized high school, identifying group-level differences in rates of application, admission, and enrollment unexplained by measures of prior achievement. These differences serve to highlight points of intervention to improve access for under-represented groups. We also look at the role of middle schools in the pipeline, examining the distribution of offers across middle schools and testing for middle school effects on application and admission. Finally, we simulate the effects of alternative admissions rules on the composition of students at the specialized high schools. A data appendix and additional tables and figures are included.