The Productivity Costs of Inefficient Hiring Practices: Evidence from Late Teacher Hiring.

We use matched employee-employer records from the teacher labor market to explore the effects of late teacher hiring on student achievement. Hiring teachers after the school year starts reduces student achievement by 0.042SD in mathematics and 0.

Teacher and Teaching Effects on Students' Attitudes and Behaviors.

Research has focused predominantly on how teachers affect students' achievement on tests despite evidence that a broad range of attitudes and behaviors are equally important to their long-term success. We find that upper-elementary teachers have large effects on self-reported measures of students' self-efficacy in math, and happiness and behavior in class. Students' attitudes and behaviors are predicted by teaching practices most proximal to these measures, including teachers' emotional support and classroom organization.

Can Principals Promote Teacher Development as Evaluators? A Case Study of Principals' Views and Experiences.

Purpose: New teacher evaluation systems have expanded the role of principals as instructional leaders, but little is known about principals' ability to promote teacher development through the evaluation process. We conducted a case study of principals' perspectives on evaluation and their experiences implementing observation and feedback cycles to better understand whether principals feel as though they are able to promote teacher development as evaluators.

Research Methods: We conducted interviews with a stratified random sample of 24 principals in an urban district that recently implemented major reforms to its teacher evaluation system.

Can Professional Environments in Schools Promote Teacher Development? Explaining Heterogeneity in Returns to Teaching Experience.

Although wide variation in teacher effectiveness is well established, much less is known about differences in teacher improvement over time. We document that average returns to teaching experience mask large variation across individual teachers and across groups of teachers working in different schools. We examine the role of school context in explaining these differences using a measure of the professional environment constructed from teachers responses to state-wide surveys.

Cognitive skills, student achievement tests, and schools.

Cognitive skills predict academic performance, so schools that improve academic performance might also improve cognitive skills. To investigate the impact schools have on both academic performance and cognitive skills, we related standardized achievement-test scores to measures of cognitive skills in a large sample (N = 1,367) of eighth-grade students attending traditional, exam, and charter public schools. Test scores and gains in test scores over time correlated with measures of cognitive skills.