This article uses variation in the labor supply of twelfth‐grade students created by interstate variations in child labor laws to estimate the effect of school‐year work on twelfth‐grade math achievement. The instrumental variable estimates in this article indicate that an exogenous decrease in school‐year hours worked of 10 hours per week would result in a 0.2 standard deviation increase in math scores. Comparisons to ordinary least squares estimates suggest that failure to account for the endogeneity of the labor supply decisions of high school students will result in underestimates of the negative impact of school‐year work on academic achievement.

Teacher performance evaluation has become a dominant theme in school reform efforts. Yet, whether evaluation changes the performance of teachers, the focus of this paper, is unknown. Instead, evaluation has largely been studied as an input to selective dismissal decisions. We study mid-career teachers for whom we observe an objective measure of productivity—value-added to student achievement—before, during, and after evaluation. We find teachers are more productive in post-evaluation years, with the largest improvements among teachers performing relatively poorly ex-ante. The results suggest teachers can gain information from evaluation and subsequently develop new skills, increase long-run effort, or both.

This paper examines the value of the GED credential and the conventional high school diploma in explaining the earnings of 27-year-old males in the early 1990s. The data base is the High School and Beyond sophomore cohort.We replicate the basic findings of prior studies that implicitly assume the labor market value of the GED credential does not depend on the skills with which dropouts left school. We show that these average effects mask a more complicated pattern. Obtaining a GED is associated with higher earnings at age 27 for those male dropouts who had very weak cognitive skills as tenth graders, but not for those who had stronger cognitive skills as tenth graders.

Using Student Performance Data to Identify Effective Classroom Practices by John H. Tyler, Eric S. Taylor, Thomas J. Kane and Amy L. Wooten. Published in volume 100, issue 2, pages 256-60 of American Economic Review, May 2010