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

Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah E. Rockoff

No 19423, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Are teachersʼ impacts on studentsʼ 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 teachersʼ 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 studentʼs prior test scores exhibit little bias in forecasting teachersʼ impacts on student achievement.

JEL-codes: H0 H52 H75 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
Note: CH ED LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published as Raj Chetty & John N. Friedman & Jonah E. Rockoff, 2014. "Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, American Economic Association, vol. 104(9), pages 2593-2632, September.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/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 (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19423

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19423

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().