The hallmark of a successful education system is increasing or maintaining high student achievement. RAND research measures the effects of various types of school reforms on student achievement, with recent studies focusing on charter schools, No Child Left Behind, reform-oriented teaching, and classroom sizes.
Blog
There’s plenty that parents can do at home to help their kids stay sharp until the new school year begins.
Journal Article
Using a nationally representative sample of high school students, the authors examine the relationship between career and technical education (CTE) coursework and mathematics achievement in high school.
Past Event
Numerous RAND Education researchers will present at the American Educational Research Association 2013 Annual Meeting, in San Francisco, CA April 27 through May 1, 2013. The theme of this year's meeting is “Education and Poverty: Theory, Research, Policy and Praxis.”
Commentary
If we want testing to exert beneficial effects on teaching and learning, we need to advocate for higher-quality tests and for evaluation and accountability systems that use multiple measures and do not rely exclusively on test scores, write Laura Hamilton and Gabriella C. Gonzalez.
Blog
Since their inception in 1992, charter schools have been a lightning rod for controversy in the education policy world. Research highlights the importance of moving beyond test scores and broadening the scope of measures that evaluate success in order to fully assess the performance of charter schools.
Journal Article
This article examines the impacts of summer instruction and test-based grade retention in New York City.
Journal Article
The goal of this study is to examine whether three recently implemented pay-for-performance programs had similar effects on teachers' motivation and reported practices.
Multimedia
In this media conference call, RAND experts on early childhood development and education explain the importance of early childhood development in laying the foundation for success later in life, as well as the potential for high-quality programs to yield a return on investment for society at large.
Commentary
Structured observation protocols for assessing how teachers provide lessons to their students offer the opportunity to provide teachers with valuable feedback on how their practices could be improved, writes Terrance Dean Savitsky.
Periodical
Judging teachers' performance by that of their students is fraught with the potential for error and unintended consequences, but several states and districts have been striving to incorporate student performance data in ways that are accurate and fair.
Commentary
The 11th anniversary of No Child Left Behind presents an opportunity to consider what the evidence tells us about how to make the bill more effective.
Journal Article
Using data from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, researchers developed a model to compile data from multiple sources that could be used to make inferences about a teacher's impact on student achievement.
Journal Article
This report presents an in-depth discussion of the technical methods, findings, and implications of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project's random assignment study of teaching effectiveness measures.
Commentary
If Hurricane Sandy causes extensive disruptions in public schools—particularly in hard-hit New York City—our research shows that choices made by parents and policymakers could significantly limit the negative short-term effects of changing schools under such difficult circumstances, writes John Pane.
Report
Improving school leadership may improve student outcomes. Evaluation is critical for effective use of resources, but poses challenges to states and districts. Evaluators and policymakers should allow time for improvements to show, use multiple evaluation measures, and interpret findings carefully.
Research Brief
Efforts to improve school leadership may improve student outcomes. Evaluators and policymakers should allow time for improvements to show, use multiple evaluation measures, and interpret findings carefully before applying them to others.
Content
Value-added models, or VAMs, attempt to measure a teacher's impact on student achievement apart from other factors, such as individual ability, family environment, past schooling, and the influence of peers. Value-added estimates enable relative judgments but are not absolute indicators of effectiveness.
Report
This fact sheet examines teachers' impact on students and how effective teachers can be identified.
Report
This fact sheet examines what students' scores on achievement tests do and don't reveal about how well teachers are meeting expectations.
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