Umut Özek

With the added emphasis on incorporating evidence of student learning into teacher evaluations, many states are using value-added modeling as part of their approach to evaluating teachers. The evidence typically comes in the form of year-to-year changes in student scores on annual standardized tests administered in spring, with the spring teacher assumed to be the only teacher in the intervening year. This approach misattributes a teacher's value-added for at least three reasons. First, ther...

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of Florida's test-based retention policy. Under this policy, students who cannot demonstrate adequate reading ability at the end of third grade are retained in third grade and provided with retention-year interventions designed to improve their reading skills. Applying quasi-experimental methods to secondary data from three large Florida school districts, the researchers will answer four questions: (1) What is the effect of being retained ...

For this project, the research team will provide evidence on the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of Virtual Enterprises (VE), a virtual work-based learning (WBL) program. Many high schools are struggling to ensure that all graduates are prepared for college and the workforce, and employers consistently report difficulty in finding workers with sufficient employability skills, such as teamwork and communication. A growing number of education practitioners and researchers have argued that inco...

The project investigates two ways in which schools and teachers might behave strategically when facing pressure from school accountability systems based on student test scores. First, schools might provide more attention to students who have full academic year eligibility. Under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2011 (NCLB), a school is only accountable for a student's performance if that student has attended that school for a certain number of days and states are required to define that time,...