American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates
American Economic Review
vol. 104,
no. 9, September 2014
(pp. 2593–2632)
(Complimentary)
Abstract
Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachers' causal impacts on student achievement. We test for bias in VA using previously unobserved parent characteristics and a quasi-experimental design based on changes in teaching staff. Using school district and tax records for more than one million children, we find that VA models which control for a student's prior test scores exhibit little bias in forecasting teachers' impacts on student achievement.Citation
Chetty, Raj, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff. 2014. "Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates." American Economic Review, 104 (9): 2593–2632. DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.9.2593Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- H75 State and Local Government: Health; Education; Welfare; Public Pensions
- I21 Analysis of Education
- J24 Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
- J45 Public Sector Labor Markets