Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale

Marianne Bitler, Sean Corcoran, Thurston Domina and Emily Penner

No 26480, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Estimates of teacher “value-added” suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the validity of value-added models. Using administrative student data from New York City, we apply commonly estimated value-added models to an outcome teachers cannot plausibly affect: student height. We find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and reading achievement, raising obvious questions about validity. Subsequent analysis finds these “effects” are largely spurious variation (noise), rather than bias resulting from sorting on unobserved factors related to achievement. Given the difficulty of differentiating signal from noise in real-world teacher effect estimates, this paper serves as a cautionary tale for their use in practice.

JEL-codes: I2 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma, nep-ore and nep-ure
Note: CH ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published as Marianne Bitler & Sean P. Corcoran & Thurston Domina & Emily K. Penner, 2021. "Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale," Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, vol 14(4), pages 900-924.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26480.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:26480

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26480

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 ().