
Douglas N. HarrisTulane University | TU · Department of Economics
Douglas N. Harris
Ph.D.
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47
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
August 2012 - July 2015
Publications
Publications (47)
Income inequality in educational attainment is a long-standing concern, and disparities in college completion have grown over time. Need-based financial aid is commonly used to promote equality in college outcomes, but its effectiveness has not been established, and some are calling it into question. A randomized experiment is used to estimate the...
Teacher accountability based on teacher value-added measures could have far-reaching effects on classroom instruction and student learning, for good and for ill. To date, however, research has focused almost entirely on the statistical properties of the measures. While a useful starting point, the validity and reliability of the measures tell us ve...
The authorizers of charter schools are an understudied piece of the charter reform process. The local school boards, state agencies, and higher education institutions that act as authorizers play a significant role in the market, determining which operators get to enter the market and which are forced to exit. This article provides an economics-bas...
Policymakers are revolutionizing teacher evaluation by attaching greater stakes to student test scores and observation-based teacher effectiveness measures, but relatively little is known about why they often differ so much. Quantitative analysis of thirty schools suggests that teacher value-added measures and informal principal evaluations are pos...
The recent availability of administrative databases that track individual students and their teachers over time has lead to both a surge in research measuring teacher quality and interest in developing accountability systems for teachers. Existing studies employ a variety of empirical models, yet few studies explicitly state or test the assumptions...
One of the key barriers in accessing postsecondary opportunities for many students is financial aid. This chapter begins by providing a review of prior evidence on the relationship between financial aid and postsecondary outcomes. One type of financial aid intervention that challenges traditional aid and scholarship options are "promise programs."...
We examine the impacts of a private need-based college financial aid program distributing grants at random among first-year Pell Grant recipients at thirteen public Wisconsin universities. The Wisconsin Scholars Grant of $3,500 per year required full-time attendance. Estimates based on four cohorts of students suggest that offering the grant increa...
Given scarce resources for evaluation, we recommend that education researchers more frequently conduct comprehensive randomized trials that generate evidence on how, why, and under what conditions interventions succeed or fail in producing effects. Recent experience evaluating a randomized need-based financial aid intervention highlights some of ou...
We examine the measurement and prediction of worker productivity using a sample of teachers and school principals. We find that principals’ evaluations are positively associated with teachers’ estimated contributions to students’ test scores (value-added), and are better predictors of teacher value-added than are teacher credentials. Principals’ as...
Research has yet to show whether new estimates of teacher performance can be used to improve teaching and learning.
We study the effects of various types of education and training on the productivity of teachers in promoting student achievement. Previous studies on the subject have been hampered by inadequate measures of teacher training and difficulties in addressing the non-random selection of teachers to students and of teachers to training. We address these...
The vast majority of research and policy related to teacher quality focuses on the supply of teachers and ignores teacher demand. In particular, the important role of school principals in hiring teachers is rarely considered. Using interviews of school principals in a midsized Florida school district, we provide an exploratory mixed methods analysi...
Background
Interest among social scientists in peer influences has grown with recent reseg-regation of the nation's schools and court decisions that limit the ability of school districts to consider race in school assignment decisions. If having more advantaged peers is beneficial, then these trends may reduce educational equity. Previous studies h...
Background/Context
A half-century ago, scholars of teaching observed that there was a disconnect between theory and evidence. This problem remains. Although there is great deal of scholarly activity about teacher effectiveness and quality, discussion of theory is largely separate from empirical evidence. In addition, research on teaching is based o...
In this mixed-methods study, we examine the degree to which district- and building-level administrators accommodate teacher-quality and test-based accountability policies in their hiring practices. We find that administrators negotiated local hiring goals with characteristics emphasized by federal and state teacher-quality policies, such as knowled...
Annual student testing may make it possible to measure the contributions to student achievement made by individual teachers. But would these “teacher value-added” measures help to improve student achievement? I consider the statistical validity, purposes, and costs of teacher value-added policies. Many of the key assumptions of teacher value added...
In this study, we consider the efficacy of a relatively new and widely accepted certification system for teachers established by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). We utilize an extensive database covering the universe of teachers and students in Florida for a four-year span to determine the relationship between NBPTS c...
The failure to account for group differences in responsiveness to financial aid is a primary shortcoming of existing higher
education research, and compromises the explanatory power of theories and models. Even more importantly, it limits the ability
of policymakers and practitioners to achieve the important goals of increased college success and r...
The common reporting of effect sizes has been an important advance in education research in recent years. However, the benchmarks used to interpret the size of these effects—as small, medium, and large—do little to inform educational administration and policymaking because they do not account for program costs. I propose an approach to establishing...
While much has been written about the process of employee selection in other occupations, there has been little discussion on the process and tools of teacher selection and why it occurs as it does. To understand this question, we conduct an extensive literature review in which we compare teacher hiring with hiring in other occupations. We also pre...
It is commonly believed that teacher turnover is unusually high and that this is a sign of failure in the education system. Previous studies have tested this idea by comparing teacher turnover with that of similar professions, but have come to contradictory conclusions. We provide additional evidence by comparing teachers with professionals from ot...
Incl. bibl., abstract In debates about accountability, advocates often point to individual "high-flying" schools that achieve high test scores despite serving disadvantaged populations. Using a near-census of U.S. public schools, this new analysis considers the likelihood that schools become high flyers. The results suggest that of the more than 60...
Diminishing marginal returns (DMR) to school inputs could explain a wide variety of findings in the research literature. One important example is the influential finding by Heyneman and Loxley that school inputs are the 'predominant influence' on achievement in developing nations, where input levels are low, even though the same school inputs have...
This study considers why Florida has been the most aggressive state in adopting school vouchers. Vouchers are consistent with Florida's tradition of aggressive educational accountability policies, arising from the state's moderate social conservatism, openness to privatization, and state demographic characteristics. Even with this fertile political...
� There is wide agreement among,researchers and educators that teachers play an important
We study the effects of various types of education and training on teacherproductivity. Previous studies on the subject have been hampered by inadequatemeasures of teacher training and difficulties addressing the non-random selectionof teachers to students and of teachers to training. We address all of theselimitations by estimating models with stu...
Incl. bibl., abstract. The rise of accountability policies during the early 1990s coincided with an increase in the achievement gap between white and minority students, reversing decades of steady improvement in outcome equity. This article explores the policies that helped to reduce the achievement gap before 1990, the effects of the subsequent sh...
Small classes and small schools appear to have educational benefits for students. In small classes, children experience fewer disruptions and receive more personal attention and individualized instruction. Likewise, in small schools, students appear to feel safer and less likely to get "lost in the crowd" and teachers are able to provide a more coh...
Charter schools represent one part of the larger movement toward parental choice in education, which is intended to improve school efficiency and innovation. We hypothesize that the number of charter schools entering in a local education market depends on how closely the distribution of education programs in public and private schools matches the d...
An important school factor affecting student achievement is the quality of teachers, however, there are misconceptions about what it means to be a quality teacher and how schools can attract and train more of them. This brief summarizes evidence about the characteristics of effective teachers, describes the characteristics of teachers and teacher p...
A Nation at Risk (NAR; National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) had a tremendous impact on what schools do and has since spawned other reforms that attest to the report's ongoing influence. Coming in the wake of a decade of economic stagnation and import pressures from overseas producers, the authors of NAR blamed these problems on sch...
While much is written about the process of employee selection in other occupations, there has been little discussion on the process and tools of teacher selection and why it occurs as it does. To understand this question, we conduct an extensive literature review in which we compare teacher hiring with hiring in other occupations. We also present n...
� Teacher quality is widely recognized as one of the most important factors in the process
Executive Summary One of the central purposes of public education is to provide opportunities for all children to learn and excel. Unfortunately, while gaps in educational outcomes have indeed improved substantially over the past half-century, poor and minority students are still well behind their more advantaged counterparts. There is also evidenc...
The authors examine two explanations for why productivity in academic degrees granted by American colleges and universities is declining. First, few popular programs and strategies in higher education are cost-effective, and those that are may be underutilized. Second, a lack of rigorous evidence about the costs and effects of higher education prac...