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The author discusses the use of value-added models (VAMs) to estimate teacher contribution to student progress, account for students' prior characteristics, and enable relative judgments, as well as the limitations of VAMs.

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Teachers, like the students they serve, never stop learning. In-service teacher professional development (PD) gives educators opportunities to learn more about pedagogy and improve their own instruction methods to boost students' academic and social and emotional outcomes. Districts make a significant financial investment to provide teacher PD, and research on the impact of teacher PD on teacher instructional practices and student education outcomes has been mixed. In addition, there are only a few studies that examine the impact of teacher PD using rigorous empirical evaluation designs (such as randomized control trials) and consider PD across multiple contexts (public versus charter schools). The authors evaluated the Chicago Collaborative, a teacher PD program that is aligned to Common Core Standards and implemented by Leading Educators, a national nonprofit organization that partners with districts and charter management organizations to help teachers develop the leadership skills that they need to successfully transition from leading students to leading their peers. The authors conducted a randomized control trial evaluation using data from 40 schools across three school districts in the Chicago area during the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 school years. They examined how the Chicago Collaborative program was implemented and whether the program impacted student achievement. The authors found that the Chicago Collaborative was successfully delivered, despite the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic at the end of the research period in 2020. The authors also found robust evidence that the Chicago Collaborative increased student test scores.

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With the launch of the New York City Community Schools Initiative (NYC-CS) in 2014, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) has increased its focus on the implementation of a holistic strategy of education reform to address the social consequences of poverty as a means to improving student outcomes. NYC-CS is a strategy to organize resources in schools and share leadership among stakeholders so that academics, health and wellness, youth development, and family engagement are integrated into the fabric of each school. New York City is implementing this strategy at a scale unmatched nationally. In this study, the authors assessed the impact of the NYC-CS through the 2017–2018 school year. The authors assessed the effects along seven outcome domains and explored the extent to which there is heterogeneity in programmatic impact based on student- and school-level characteristics. The authors leveraged innovative quasi-experimental methodology to determine whether students in the community schools are performing better than they would be had their schools not been designated as Community Schools. The findings of this report will contribute to the emerging evidence base on the efficacy of the community school strategy and will be useful for other school district– and state-level policymakers interested in developing or refining similar interventions that support students' and communities' academic, social, and emotional well-being.

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) increasingly seeks fixed-price contracts for Public Assistance expenditures to help communities rebuild after disaster. FEMA and those communities have large incentives to estimate costs correctly before contracts are signed. One challenge to providing an accurate estimate of construction costs is that the cost of rebuilding can be affected by the reconstruction effort itself. One way to account for such changes is to use a future price forecast (FPF) factor, which adjusts a project's cost estimate to account for overall price-level increases caused by a disaster. The purpose of this study was to help FEMA identify when to use an FPF. To carry out the study, the authors convened panels of experts to discuss scenarios of hypothetical disasters-in particular, how these disasters could affect local economies. They also tested a variety of community and disaster-related measures that might be predictive of large cost increases and explored the relationship between different types of skills and labor-mobility variables and disaster effects on construction costs. They then estimated how often disasters cause large increases in construction costs and identified criteria to use in determining when an FPF might be warranted. They also explored the implications of these criterion thresholds by estimating FPFs in some what-if scenarios.