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.

自2000年代初以来，教育评估研究主要集中在教师对学生学业成绩的贡献上，而不是学校对学生学业成绩的贡献上，这是因为担心后者的估计值较小，不稳定，并且更容易出现测量误差。我们认为应该缩小这种差距。使用来自马萨诸塞州三所公立学校学生的行政数据（N= 123,261）和两级模型，我们估计中学对八年级和十年级数学成绩的增值效应，以及重要的是，非考试成绩：四年制大学入学率。将我们的结果与以教师为中心的研究进行比较，我们发现学校效果（包括与教学和非教学相关的因素）起初较小，但与个别老师的效果几乎一样稳定，甚至更持久。我们的研究激发了未来的研究，估计教师和学校对各种结果的长期影响。