The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has been criticized for encouraging schools to neglect students whose performance exceeds the proficiency threshold or lies so far below it that there is no reasonable prospect of closing the gap during the current year. We examine this hypothesis using longitudinal data from 2002–03 through 2005–06. Our identification strategy relies on the fact that as NCLB was phased in, states had some latitude in designating which grades were to count for purposes of a school making adequate yearly progress. We compare the mathematics achievement distribution in a grade before and after it became a high-stakes grade. We find in general no evidence that gains were concentrated on students near the proficiency standard at the expense of students scoring much lower, though there are inconsistent signs of a trade-off with students at the upper end of the distribution.

This article presents findings from the first independent, third-party appraisal of the impact of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) on student test score gains in mathematics. TAP is a comprehensive school reform model designed to attract highly effective teachers, improve instructional effectiveness, and elevate student achievement. We use a panel data set to estimate a TAP treatment effect by comparing student test score gains in mathematics in schools that participated in TAP with student test score gains in non-TAP schools. Ordinary least squares estimation reveals a positive TAP treatment effect on student test score gains in the elementary grades, with weaker but still positive point estimates in the secondary grades. When estimation methods control for selection bias, the positive effect remains at the elementary level, but most estimates for grades 6 through 10 turn negative. Our findings are qualified by the lack of information on the fidelity of implementation across TAP schools and on variation in features of TAP programs at the school level.

The Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study testing the hypothesis that rewarding teachers for improved student scores on standardized tests would cause scores to rise. Results, as described in Springer et al. (2010b), did not confirm this hypothesis. In this article we provide additional information on the POINT study that may be of particular interest to researchers contemplating their own studies of similar policies. Our discussion focuses on the policy environment in which POINT was launched, considerations that affected the design of POINT, and a variety of lessons learned from the implementation of the experiment.

Conventional value-added assessment requires that achievement be reported on an interval scale. While many metrics do not have this property, application of item response theory (IRT) is said to produce interval scales. However, it is difficult to confirm that the requisite conditions are met. Even when they are, the properties of the data that make a test IRT scalable may not be the properties we seek to represent in an achievement scale, as shown by the lack of surface plausibility of many scales resulting from the application of IRT. An alternative, ordinal data analysis, is presented. It is shown that value-added estimates are sensitive to the choice of ordinal methods over conventional techniques. Value-added practitioners should ask themselves whether they are so confident of the metric properties of these scales that they are willing to attribute differences to the superiority of the latter.