Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates

Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah E. Rockoff

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

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.

Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (444)

Published in American Economic Review

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http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/30749073/w19423.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates (2014)
Working Paper: Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates (2013)
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