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 skill development. Proper teacher evaluation design has been understood as successfully weighting the accountability and professional growth dimensions of policy and practice. I develop a model of teacher effectiveness that incorporates improvement from evaluation and detail conditions which determine the effectiveness of teacher evaluation for growth and accountability at improving student outcomes. Drawing on empirical evidence from the personnel economics, economics of education and measurement literatures, I simulate the long-term effects of a set of teacher evaluation policies. I find that those that treat evaluation for accountability and evaluation for growth as substitutes outperform policies that treat them as complements. I conclude that optimal teacher evaluation policies would impose accountability on teachers performing below a defined level and above which teachers would be subject to no accountability pressure but would receive intensive instructional supports. 

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.