In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education granted states the opportunity to apply for waivers from the core requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. In exchange, many states implemented systems of differentiated accountability that included a focus on schools with the largest achievement gaps between subgroups of students. We use administrative data from Michigan in a series of regression-discontinuity analyses to study the effects of these school reforms on schools and students. We find some evidence that targeting schools for such reforms led to small, short-run reductions in the within-school math achievement gap. However, these reductions were driven by stagnant performance of lower-achieving students alongside declines in the performance of their higher-achieving peers. These findings serve as a cautionary tale for the capacity of the accountability provisions embedded in the recent reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, the Every Student Succeeds Act, to meaningfully improve student and school outcomes.

Research on the relationship between teacher characteristics and teacher effectiveness has been underway for over a century, yet little progress has been made in linking teacher quality with factors observable at the time of hire. To extend this literature, we administered an in-depth survey to new math teachers in New York City and collected information on a number of nontraditional predictors of effectiveness, including teaching-specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of self-efficacy, and scores on a commercially available teacher selection instrument. We find that only a few of these predictors have statistically significant relationships with student and teacher outcomes. However, the individual variables load onto two factors, which measure what one might describe as teachers' cognitive and noncognitive skills. We find that both factors have a moderately large and statistically significant relationship with student and teacher outcomes, particularly with student test scores.