Improving student achievement [electronic resource] : rethinking the impacts of teacher quality and school finance

Across three papers, I reevaluate the roles that teacher quality and court-ordered school finance reform have in improving student achievement. In the first paper, I examine the extent to which teachers have longer-term effects on student achievement using administrative data from Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS). I define longer-term effects as the effects teachers have on student achievement in the years after they teach their students. Using a flexible statistical model, I obtain teacher-specific short-term and longer-term effects. I also estimate the extent to which short-term and longer-term effects relate to one another, on average. Results suggest that there is meaningful variation in teacher longer-term effects. I also find that short-term and longer-term effects are not perfectly correlated with each other. Finally, I find that having a master's degree or Ph.D. is associated with higher longer-term effects when estimating the model for math teachers. In the second paper, I assess the validity and stability of short-term and longer-term teacher effect estimates. I assess validity by examining whether future teachers predict the past test score gains of students they have not yet taught. This particular test is designed to provide evidence of student sorting bias that could potentially invalidate the teacher effect estimates. I then assess the stability of teacher effect estimates by considering the stability of teacher effects across different cohorts of students and the stability of teacher effects across math and English language arts within a given cohort of students. Results show that teacher effect estimates suffer from sorting bias. Although this is problematic, it suggests the need to understand whether the sorting bias is large enough to invalidate teacher effect estimates; this is an area of future research. With respect to stability, there is substantive overlap of teacher effects---both short-term and longer-term---across student cohorts, which suggests that the estimates carry some true signal of teacher quality and are reliable. Overlap of teacher effects across subjects is also non-trivial, but it is less stable the across cohort stability. These results suggest that teachers have different strengths in different subjects. In the third paper, Kenneth Shores and I provide new evidence about the effect of court-ordered finance reform on per-pupil revenues and graduation rates. We account for cross-sectional dependence and heterogeneity in the treated and counterfactual groups to estimate the effect of overturning a state's finance system. Seven years after reform, the highest poverty quartile in a treated state experienced a 4 to 12 percent increase in per-pupil spending and a 5 to 8 percentage point increase in graduation rates. We subject the model to various sensitivity tests. In most cases, point estimates for graduation rates are within 2 percentage points of our preferred model.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Loeb Susanna primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Dee Thomas S. (Thomas Sean) advisor. Thesis advisor
Reardon Sean F. advisor. Thesis advisor