We use a rich administrative dataset from North Carolina to explore questions related to the
relationship between teacher characteristics and credentials on the one hand and student
achievement on the other. Though the basic questions underlying this research are not new—
and, indeed, have been explored in many papers over the years within the rubric of the
“education production function”—the availability of data on all teachers and students in
North Carolina over a 10-year period allows us to explore them in more detail than has been …