Current Projects

We work with practitioners and policymakers to define and refine the Center's research agenda, which will, of course, naturally evolve as certain questions are answered and others come to the fore. The following represent a sampling of the questions we are currently addressing in collaboration with school district leaders:

• New Study of Boston Charter and pilot schools finds charter schools have positive effects on student achievement: Findings of groundbreaking study suggest charter school students in Boston outperform their peers at other public schools in Boston. Results for pilot schools were less clear; some analyses showed positive results at the elementary and high school level, while results for middle school students were less encouraging. The study uses an innovative research design based on school lotteries that allowed for a direct comparison of charter and pilot school students with their peers.
  
  Informing the Debate: Comparing Boston's Charter, Pilot and Traditional Schools
  Informing the Debate: Technical Appendix
• National Board Certification and Teacher Effectiveness in Los Angeles: Evidence from a new random assignment experiment in Los Angeles elementary schools finds students assigned to teachers rated highly by the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards outperform students in comparison classrooms. The NBPTS has developed a rigorous process to identify exemplary teachers. Yet, little has been done to connect the NBPTSs assessments to student achievement outcomes. The Center, working with the Los Angeles Unified School District, studied the extent to which the NBPTS process identifies teachers that produce the largest gains in student achievement. We compared the performance of classrooms randomly assigned to either an NBPTS applicant or a comparison teacher. The report includes a number of suggestions for improving the predictive power of the NBPTS scaling process.
  
  National Board Certification and Teacher Effectiveness: Evidence from a Random Assignment Experiment
• New York City Teaching Fellows: There are large and persistent differences in effectiveness among teachers that are apparent as early as the first year of teaching. Yet, there is little evidence that the "paper credentials" (e.g., undergraduate GPA, certification to teach) that district HR departments traditionally use to evaluate candidates are good predictors of teacher effectiveness. We are currently working with the New York City schools to determine whether other information that could be gathered during the hiring process and afterward (e.g., responses to interview questions, survey responses about attitudes towards learning) might help the district pick teachers that are likely to be more effective at raising student achievement.
  
  What Does Certification Tell Us About Teacher Effectiveness? Evidence From New York City
• School Choice in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina: In Fall 2002, the Mecklenburg County school district (which includes Charlotte) implemented a school choice plan after three decades of bussing on the basis of race. Under that plan, 95 percent of parents in the district listed their top three choices of schools. When schools were oversubscribed, the district held lotteries to determine which students were allowed to enter. We have used the lottery data to study the impact of being admitted to ones first choice school. Moreover, we have been studying the data on parental choice to determine the relative weight parents put on school traits such as proximity of the school to home, racial composition, and test scores in choosing schools for their children. The relative weights parents place on such factors have important implications for the incentives school face in the market created by school choice.
  
  Preferences And Heterogeneous Treatment Effects In A Public School Choice Lottery