Teachers are the most important in-school contributors to student achievement, but there is widespread concern that the rigidities of the public school system make it unresponsive to teacher quality. In this lecture Dr. Chingos will discuss three studies of how schools respond to differences in teacher effectiveness (as measured by value-added to student achievement), all of which are based on administrative data from the state of Florida. Mathew Chingos, Fellow, Brookings Institution Matthew M.
Sean F. Reardon, Professor of Education, Stanford University Income inequality among the families of school-age children in the US has grown sharply in the last 40 years. In this talk Dr. Reardon will describe his research findings from three studies that examine the relationship of income and income inequality to educational outcomes. The first focuses on trends in the 'income achievement gap' (the test score gap between children from high- and low-income families) over the last 50 years, using data from 13 nationally representative studies conducted between 1959-2009.