Can you guess where I am from the pic? I can't quite pin down my reaction, other than "this is interesting."

As one of my co-authors likes to say, "it's out in the wild." It being our new paper on the effects of elementary schools departmentalizing (having teachers specialize by subject). Here's the link, which is free for 50 days starting today: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

There are also large ethnic/racial disparities and much of this is associated with test score differences, which can be traced all the way to the third grade. The performance pyramid figure shows the proportion of students by race and gender in each test decile in the 3rd grade. 3/3

Here's an example of the gender gaps (favoring females) in terms of college completion, especially in BA programs . 2/n

Scouting out real estate for @aefpweb.bsky.social's Paris office!

New @caldercenter.bsky.social working paper alert! We (many authors) examine what applications to different teaching & principal jobs suggest about the preferences of job applicants for schools: caldercenter.org/publications... 1/n

Differentiated pay, in you I believe! A more subtle take is that I do think we ought to use pay more strategically to address teacher labor market issues & improve workforce quality. I'll be on a panel talking about this next week! Sign up here: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Let me translate the abstract: we should be more serious about teacher evaluation. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3...

There are many good things to say about @aefpweb.bsky.social, that it's an organization that knows the right mug size is just one of them!

Interested in teacher hiring decisions? I'll be presenting research about making better hiring decision this Friday at 12:30 PT. It's in person if you are in Seattle, but you can also register here for Zoom link: washington.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

@aefpweb.bsky.social is already in full swing! Lot's of good stuff, but if you want to see an interesting session on Saturday morning, I know that 10.02 is a blockbuster having read all the papers.

@jillbarshay.bsky.social story about how parents interpret test scores and grades. New evidence finds that they are much more likely to rely on grades as an indicator for their students academic achievement. hechingerreport.org/proof-points...

The "()" part of title of our paper says it all "(Unexpected Findings on)...", we were very surprised by the results from a RCT we did on student teacher placements. We examined two different initiatives designed to improve student teaching and found that the intervention effected jobs ... 3/n

Teacher human capital...more evidence that it really matters for long-run student outcomes: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Summer school participation pretty consistently provided modest benefits to students in math (but NOT reading), see Figure 1. The math benefits of summary school in our studies were generally more consistent and larger than what we found for tutoring (Figure 2).

A couple of quick thoughts: 1) not surprisingly, early test performance matters for predicting high school outcomes; an important explanation for differences in high school subgroup outcomes is the change in test scores as students progress through school (see Figure 1).

One of the things that I find interesting in this work is that the relationship between teacher applications/slot and poverty is different for traditional public and charter schools. Here's a pic, you'll have to read the paper for more on this!

These were fun to do b/c they offer really practical advice about how to better utilize (mostly) existing data, so hopefully become more efficient + I got to work w/ a great set of co-authors! 3/3

We also find that lower-SAT college students are disproportionately interested in teaching, but the SAT differences are not huge. 3/n

The results are not terribly surprising, white females are much more likely to express an interest in teaching than are other demographic groups, but even conditional on that interest, they are more likely to select a teacher ed major once in college. 2/n

Hot off the presses a new @caldercenter.bsky.social paper on which college students are opting into a path toward becoming a teacher (by applying to a teacher ed program): caldercenter.org/publications... 1/n

So much about this @nytimes.com piece resonates with me, in particular: "Nationally, there has been little political will from either party to meaningfully lift student outcomes." Gift article if you want to read it: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/u...

Given what we know about late teacher hiring, it's quite likely that late posting of teacher job openings indicate trouble for student achievement. We look at this phenomenon in Washington state using scraped job openings. 1/2

In our second paper, we used national data to assess whether licensure test waivers impacted different measures of teacher supply. While we see some evidence of a bump in new credentials in the 1st pandemic year, we do not find much overall evidence of a supply effect. 4/n

Teachers coming into the profession with waivers appear initially to be as high performing/effective as those who did not have waivers, but a note of caution: In MA, later cohorts of teachers with waivers were significantly less effective. 3/n

In one we look across five states at how waivers seemed to influence the demographics of new teachers and their impact on students. We find pretty consistent evidence across states that new teachers were more diverse. 2/n

For your Monday morning enjoyment!: two new @caldercenter.bsky.social papers looking at the effects of pandemic-era teacher licensure test waivers on the teacher labor market: caldercenter.org/publications... caldercenter.org/publications... A short 🧵 1/n

Consistent significant positive effects on math tests, about 2.4% of an SD and no significant effects in ELA. The math results are consistent across years (an extra year helps) and districts.

Relatedly, we are far less sure about whether the gains are statistically significant. See the below figure from the report. You can see the slope (gains in teacher value added) is much flatter even after year 3 (regardless of type of school). 3/n