School Effects Revisited: The Size, Stability, and Persistence of Middle Schools’ Effects on Academic Outcomes

Since the early 2000s, educational evaluation research has primarily centered on teachers’, rather than schools’, contributions to students’ academic outcomes due to concerns that estimates of the latter were smaller, less stable, and more prone to measurement error. We argue that this disparity should be reduced. Using administrative data from three cohorts of Massachusetts public school students ( N = 123,261) and two-level models, we estimate...