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Teacher churning likely harms student achievement. However, the phenomenon of within-school grade-level teacher reassignments is understudied. The current study provides descriptive evidence on the frequency and predictors of within-school teacher grade switching using both longitudinal administrative data from Michigan and nationally representative survey data. About 7% of self-contained classroom teachers change grades following any given school year. Inexperienced teachers are relatively more likely to switch grades, and grade-level reassignments are inequitably distributed across both schools and students. For example, urban schools experience significantly higher rates of grade switching. Charter schools experience significantly less grade switching than traditional public schools.

Parental influences, particularly parents' occupations, may influence individuals' entry into the teaching profession. This mechanism may contribute to the relatively static demographic composition of the teaching force over time. We assess the role of parental influences on occupational choice by testing whether the children of teachers are disproportionately likely to become teachers themselves and whether the intergenerational transmission of teaching varies by race or sex. Overall, children whose mothers are teachers are seven percentage points more likely to enter teaching than children of nonteachers. The transmission of teaching from mother to child is about the same for White children and for Black daughters; however, transmission rates for Hispanic daughters are even larger while those for Black sons are near zero.

Student attendance is both a critical input and intermediate output of the education production function. However, the malleable classroom-level determinants of student attendance are poorly understood. We estimate the causal effect of class size, class composition, and observable teacher qualifications on student attendance by leveraging the random classroom assignments made by Tennessee's Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Project class size experiment. A 10-student increase in class size increases the probability of being chronically absent by about 3 percentage points (21%). For Black students, random assignment to a Black teacher reduces the probability of chronic absence by 3.1 percentage points (26%). However, naive mediation analyses suggest that attendance is not a mechanism through which class size and same-race teachers improve student achievement.

As universities cut library funding and forego expensive journal subscriptions, many academic organizations and researchers, including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), are moving toward open-access publications that are freely downloadable by anyone with a working internet connection. However, the impact of paywalls on the consumption of academic articles is unclear. We provide novel evidence on this question by exploiting a natural experiment in which six high-impact, usually gated AERA journals became open access for a 2-month period in 2017. Using monthly download data and an always-open-access journal as a comparison group, we show that making journals open access likely increased article downloads in those journals by 55% to 95% per month. Given a per-article download price of $36, this suggests a relatively elastic response: The average price elasticity of demand for downloads is 1.2, with individual journal elasticities ranging from 0.6 to 2.

Grade inflation is pervasive in American high schools. Is rampant grade inflation cause for concern? How teachers' grading standards affect student success is an empirical question--one that the author addresses in this article in a new study of roughly 350,000 North Carolina students taking Algebra I between 2006 and 2016. The author first measures the grading standards of individual Algebra I teachers in the state by comparing the course grades they assigned their students to those students' scores on a standardized end-of-course exam. The author then asks whether students did better or worse than expected when they were assigned to a more-demanding teacher. The results confirm that "everyone gets a gold star" is not a victimless mentality. Not only do students learn more from tougher teachers, but they also do better in math classes up to two years later. The size of these effects is on the order of replacing an average teacher with one near the top of her game.

Ten years of administrative data from a diverse, private, top-100 law school are used to examine the ways in which female and nonwhite students benefit from exposure to demographically similar faculty in first-year, required law courses. Arguably, causal impacts of exposure to same-sex and same-race instructors on course-specific outcomes such as course grades are identified by leveraging quasi-random classroom assignments and a two-way (student and classroom) fixed effects strategy. Having an other-sex instructor reduces the likelihood of receiving a good grade (A or A-) by 1 percentage point (3 percent) and having an other-race instructor reduces the likelihood of receiving a good grade by 3 percentage points (10 percent). The effects of student--instructor demographic mismatch are particularly salient for nonwhite and female students. These results provide novel evidence of the pervasiveness of demographic-match effects and of the graduate school education production function.

Identifying anomalies, or empirical facts that contradict theoretical predictions, is a common form of proof by contradiction in economics and finance. We identify an apparent pricing anomaly in the market for trading cards: large and persistent death effects of about 20% are observed following the death of legendary baseball players. Rational investors should anticipate each player's eventual death, so these results suggest that profit opportunities are being left on the table. The arguably causal estimates come from interrupted time series models that adjust flexibly for time pre- and post-death and the time of sale using high-frequency sales data. The effect is largest in the days immediately following the death, but prices remain elevated for at least 60 days. Generally, our findings reaffirm the presence of a causal "nostalgia effect" of celebrity deaths on consumer demand for collectibles and products associated with the celebrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite abundant anecdotes and theories suggesting a causal effect of teachers' expectations on student outcomes, documenting its presence and size has been challenging. The reason is simple: positive correlations between what teachers expect and what students ultimately accomplish might simply result from teachers being skilled observers. In practice, distinguishing between accurate and biased expectations is difficult, because both teacher expectations and student outcomes are likely influenced by factors that researchers are unable to observe. Anecdotally, the authors believe that teachers' expectations are important. But just how important might they be? And could differences in teachers' expectations of white students and black students help to explain gaps in key outcomes such as college enrollment and completion? To explore these questions, the authors analyze the federal Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, which followed a cohort of 10th-grade students for a decade. Among other questions, the students' teachers were asked whether they expected their students to complete a four-year college degree. The authors use these responses to first document the presence of racial bias in teachers' expectations, and then study the effects of differences in teacher expectations on students' likelihood of completing college. The analysis supports the conventional wisdom that teacher expectations matter.

School districts across the United States increasingly use value-added models (VAMs) to evaluate teachers. In practice, VAMs typically rely on lagged test scores from the previous academic year, which necessarily conflate summer with school-year learning and potentially bias estimates of teacher effectiveness. We investigate the practical implications of this problem by comparing estimates from "cross-year" VAMs with those from arguably more valid "within-year" VAMs using fall and spring test scores from the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). "Cross-year" and "within-year" VAMs frequently yield significant differences that remain even after conditioning on participation in summer activities.

The summer activities and summer learning of exceptional students--students who have an individualized education plan or who are English-language learners--are potentially important yet understudied. We analyze nationally representative survey data to fill this gap. Exceptional students are significantly less likely than their mainstream counterparts to participate in organized summer activities and summer day care but are more likely to attend summer school and to practice math with a parent. Exceptional learners make significantly greater reading gains during the summer vacation than their mainstream counterparts; however, this is true only for middle- and high-income exceptional learners. Moreover, the well-documented summer learning loss of low-income students in reading appears to be entirely driven by lower summer learning rates of low-income exceptional learners. There are no such differences in math achievement.

One mechanism by which teachers might affect student learning is through the grading standards they set for their classrooms. However, the effects of grading standards on student outcomes are understudied. Using administrative data that links individual students and teachers in Algebra I classrooms from 2006 to 2016, we examine the effects of teachers' grading standards on student learning and attendance. High teacher grading standards increase both contemporaneous student achievement in Algebra I and performance in subsequent math classes. Heterogeneity analyses find that these impacts are positive and similar in size for students of different backgrounds, aptitudes, and school contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) increased accountability pressure in U.S. public schools by threatening to impose sanctions on Title-1 schools that failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in consecutive years. Difference-in-difference estimates of the effect of failing AYP in the first year of NCLB on teacher effort in the subsequent year suggest that on average, teacher absences in North Carolina fell by about 10 percent. The probability of being frequently absent similarly decreased. These reductions in teacher absences were driven by within-teacher increases in effort and by teachers in the bottom half of the effectiveness distribution. On average, only a modest amount of the achievement gains attributable to the increased accountability pressure are explained by the corresponding decline in teacher absences.

Research on the effectiveness of educational inputs, particularly research on teacher effectiveness, typically overlooks teachers' potential impact on behavioral outcomes, such as student attendance. Using longitudinal data on teachers and students in North Carolina I estimate teacher effects on primary school student absences in a value-added framework. The analysis yields two main findings: First, teachers have arguably causal, statistically significant effects on student absences that persist over time. Second, teachers who improve test scores do not necessarily improve student attendance, suggesting that effective teaching is multidimensional and teachers who are effective in one domain are not necessarily effective in others.

Gender differences in human capital investments made outside of the traditional school day suggest that males and females consume, respond to, and form habits relating to education differently. We document robust, statistically significant one-hour weekly gender gaps in secondary students' non-school study time using time diary data from the 2003-2012 waves of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and transcript data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS). These complementary data sets provide consistent evidence of gender gaps that favor females and are not explained by gender differences in after-school time use, parental involvement, educational expectations, course taking, past academic achievement, or cognitive ability.

Evidence on optimal school size is mixed. We estimate the effect of transitory changes in school size on the academic achievement of fourth-and fifth-grade students in North Carolina using student-level longitudinal administrative data. Estimates of value-added models that condition on school-specific linear time trends and a variety of teacher-by-school, student, and school-by-year fixed effects suggest that, on average, there is no causal relationship between school size and academic performance. However, two subgroups of interest are significantly harmed by school size: socioeconomically disadvantaged students and students with learning disabilities. The largest effects are observed among students with learning disabilities: A 10-student increase in grade size is found to decrease their math and reading achievement by about 0.015 test-score standard deviations.

This paper examines the daily labor supply of a potentially important, but often overlooked, source of instruction in U.S. public schools: substitute teachers. I estimate a sequential binary-choice model of substitute teachers' job-offer acceptance decisions using data on job offers made by a randomized automated calling system. Importantly, this randomization generates exogenous variation in offer quality. I find that determinants of substitutes' offer-acceptance decisions include the offer's arrival time, commute time, day of week, classroom type, school type, and school quality. Interestingly, conditional on school quality student demographics do not significantly influence substitutes' decisions. Longer and higher paying full-day jobs are preferred to half-day jobs, although conditional on daily pay, job length does not significantly impact daily labor-supply decisions. Preferences for several job characteristics are found to vary with substitutes' regular-teacher certification status. Policy implications of these findings are discussed. (Contains 9 tables and 3 figures.)