Essays on improving the quality of education in K-12 urban public schools

The essays in this thesis examine opportunities to better support the success of students and teachers in urban public schools. I do this by drawing on data from traditional and charter public schools in two urban school districts, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and Boston Public Schools. In the first essay, my coauthor and I document how average improvement patterns mask large variation across individual teachers, and across groups of teachers who work in different schools. We attempt to better understand why teachers are improving more in some schools than in others by constructing a measure of the overall professional environment in schools from teachers' responses on state-wide surveys. Our analyses show that, on average, teachers working in schools at the 75 th percentile of professional environment ratings improved 20% more than teachers working in schools at the 25 th percentile after five years, and almost 40% more after ten years. In the second essay, I study MATCH Charter Public School's initiative to incorporate two hours of individualized tutorials integrate throughout an extended school day. The unanticipated implementation of this initiative and the school's lottery enrollment policy allow me to use two complementary quasi-experimental methods to estimate program effects. I find that the additional time for tutorials increased achievement on 10 th grade English language arts (ELA) exams by 0.15-0.25 standard deviations per year. Lower-achieving students at MATCH experienced similar gain in mathematics achievement although I find no overall effect in mathematics beyond the large gains MATCH students were already making prior to the implementation of tutorials. In the third essay, my coauthor and I evaluate the efficacy of teacher communication with parents and students as a means of increasing student engagement. We conduct a randomized field experiment in partnership with MATCH in which 6th and 9th grade students were assigned to receive a daily phone call home and a text/written message during a mandatory summer school program. We find that frequent teacher-family communication immediately increased student engagement as measured by homework completion rates, on-task behavior, and class participation. On average, teacher-family communication increased the odds that students completed their homework by 40%, decreased instances in which teachers had to redirect students' attention to the task at hand by 25%, and increased class participation rates by 15%.