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Although many recognize that social and behavioral skills play an important role in educational stratification, no studies have attempted to estimate teachers’ effects on these outcomes. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), the authors estimate teacher effects on social and behavioral skills as well as on academic achievement. Teacher effects on social and behavioral skill development are sizeable, and are somewhat larger than teacher effects on academic development. Because—as is shown here—social and behavioral skills have a positive effect on the growth of academic skills in the early elementary grades, the teachers who are good at enhancing social and behavioral skills provide an additional indirect boost to academic skills in addition to their direct teaching of academic skills. Like previous studies, the authors find that observable characteristics of teachers and the instructional approaches utilized in their classrooms are weak predictors of teacher effects. However, the present results suggest that the teachers who produce better than average academic results are not always the same teachers who excel in enhancing social and behavioral skills.

Do schools reduce or perpetuate inequality by race and family income? Most studies conclude that schools play only a small role in explaining socioeconomic and racial disparities in educational outcomes, but they usually draw this conclusion based solely on test scores. We reconsider this finding using longitudinal data on test scores and four-year college attendance among high school students in Massachusetts and Texas. We show that unexplained differences between high schools are larger for college attendance than for test scores. These differences are arguably caused by differences between the schools themselves. Furthermore, while these apparent differences in high school effectiveness increase income disparities in college attendance, they reduce racial disparities. Social scientists concerned with schools’ role in transmitting inequality across generations should reconsider the assumption that schools either increase or reduce all disparities and should direct attention to explaining why high schools’ effects on specific outcomes and groups of students appear to vary so much.

We study the impact of accountability pressure in Texas public high schools in the 1990s on postsecondary attainment and earnings, using administrative data from the Texas Schools Project (TSP). We find that high schools respond to the risk of being rated Low-Performing by increasing student achievement on high-stakes exams. Years later, these students are more likely to have attended college and completed a four-year degree, and they have higher earnings at age 25. However, we find no overall impactand large declines in attainment and earnings for low-scoring students -of pressure to achieve a higher accountability rating. An online appendix is available at: http://www.nber.org/data-appendix/w19444 2 Today's schools must offer a rigorous academic curriculum to prepare students for the rising skill demands of the modern economy (Levy and Murnane, 2004). Yet at least since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, policymakers have acted on the principle that America's schools are failing. The ambitious and far-reaching No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) identified test-based accountability as the key to improved school performance. NCLB mandates that states conduct annual standardized assessments in math and reading, that schools' average performance on assessments be publicized, and that rewards and sanctions be doled out to schools on the basis of their students' performance on the exams.However, more than a decade after the passage of NCLB, we know very little about the impact of test-based accountability on students' long-run life chances. Previous work has found large gains on high-stakes tests, with some evidence of smaller gains on low-stakes exams that is inconsistent across When do improvements on high-stakes tests represent real learning gains? And when do they make students better off in the long-run? The main difficulty in interpreting accountability-induced student achievement gains is that once a measure becomes the basis of assessing performance, it loses its diagnostic value (Campbell 1976, Kerr 1995, Neal 2013. Previous research has focused on measuring performance on low-stakes exams, yet academic achievement is only one of many possible ways that teachers and schools may affect students (Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff 2012, Jackson 2012).While there are many goals of public schooling, test-based accountability is premised on the belief that student achievement gains will lead to long-run improvements in important life outcomes such as educational attainment and earnings. High-stakes testing creates incentives for teachers and schools to adjust their effort toward improving test performance in the short-run. Whether these changes make students better off in the long-run depends critically on the correlation between the actions that schools take to raise test scores, and the resulting changes in earnings and educational attainment at the margin (Holmstrom and Milgrom 1991, Baker 1992, Hout et al., 2011.