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 middle schools’ value-added effects on eighth-grade and 10th-grade math scores and, importantly, a non–test score outcome: 4-year college enrollment. Comparing our results to teacher-centered studies, we find that school effects (encompassing both teaching- and nonteaching-related factors) are initially smaller but nearly as stable and perhaps more persistent than are individual teacher effects. Our study motivates future research estimating the long-term effects of both teachers and schools on a wide range of outcomes.