Teacher evaluation policies seek to improve student outcomes by increasing the effort and skill levels of current and future teachers. Current policy and most prior research treats teacher evaluation as balancing two aims: accountability and growth. Proper teacher evaluation design has been understood as successfully weighting the accountability and growth dimensions of policy and practice. I detail six assumptions underlying teacher evaluation for growth and accountability and assess their reasonableness in light of empirical evidence from the personnel economics, social psychology and management literatures. I simulate a set of teacher evaluation policies and find that those that treat evaluation for accountability and evaluation for growth as substitutes modestly outperform policies that treat them as complements. The teachers’ rates of learning through evaluation and the labor market effects of evaluation are critical in determining its impact. I conclude with recommendations for the design of teacher evaluation policies.

In the early 1990s, the Supreme Court established standards to facilitate the release of school districts from racial desegregation orders. Over the next two decades, federal courts declared almost half of all districts under court order in 1991 to be “unitary”—that is, to have met their obligations to eliminate dual systems of education. I leverage a comprehensive dataset of all districts that were under court order in 1991 to assess the national effects of the termination of desegregation orders on indices of residential-racial segregation and high-school dropout rates. I conclude that the release from court orders moderately increased the short-term rates of Hispanic–White residential segregation. Furthermore, the declaration of districts as unitary increased rates of 16- to 19-year-old school dropouts by around 1 percentage point for Blacks, particularly those residing outside the South, and 3 percentage points for Hispanics.

We examine whether the legal decision to grant unitary status to the
Charlotte–Mecklenburg school district, which led to the end of race-conscious
student assignment policies, increased the probability that families with children
enrolled in the district would move to neighborhoods with a greater proportion
of student residents of the same race as their own children. Motivated
by the rich but inconclusive literature on the consequences of educational
and residential segregation, we make use of a natural policy experiment—a
judicial decision to end court-ordered busing—to estimate the causal
impacts of this policy shift on household residential decisions. We find
that, for those who moved, the legal decision made White families with children
in the Charlotte–Mecklenburg Schools substantially more likely than
they were during desegregation to move to a neighborhood with a greater
proportion of White residents than their own neighborhood.