We would like to acknowledge financial support from the Spencer, Walton, and WT Grant Foundations. We also express appreciation for comments provided by seminar participants at Stanford University and by participants at the AEFP and APPAM research conferences. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

States that receive federal waivers to the No Child Left Behind Act were required to implement reforms in designated “Focus Schools” that contribute to achievement gaps. We examine the performance effects of such “differentiated accountability” reforms in Louisiana. These Focus School reforms emphasized school-needs assessments and aligned technical assistance. These reforms may have also been uniquely high-powered because they were linked to a letter-based school-rating system. We examine the impact of these reforms in a sharp regression-discontinuity (RD) design. We find that, over each of 3 years, Louisiana’s Focus School reforms had no measurable impact on school performance. We discuss evidence that these findings reflect policy reform fatigue and poor quality of implementation at the state and local level.

Despite growing concern over teachers’ ability to live comfortably where they work, we know little about the systematic relationship between affordability and teachers’ well-being, particularly in high-cost urban areas. We use novel survey data from San Francisco Unified School District to identify the patterns and prevalence of economic anxiety among teachers and assess how this anxiety predicts teachers’ attitudes, behaviors, and turnover. We find that San Francisco teachers have far higher levels of economic anxiety on average than a national sample of employed adults, and that younger teachers are particularly financially anxious. Furthermore, such anxiety predicts measures of job performance and teacher retention—economically anxious teachers tend to have more negative attitudes about their jobs, have worse attendance, and are 50% more likely to depart the district within 2 years after the survey.