Teacher Performance and Accountability Incentives

Hugh Macartney, Robert McMillan and Uros Petronijevic

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper documents a new empirical regularity: teacher value-added increases within-teacher when accountability incentives are strengthened. That finding motivates a strategy to separate value-added into incentive-varying teacher effort and incentive-invariant teacher ability, combining rich longitudinal data with exogenous incentive-policy variation from North Carolina. Our estimates indicate that teacher effort and ability both raise current and future test scores, with ability having stronger effects. These estimates feed into a framework for comparing the cost-effectiveness of alternative education policies. For illustration, we show incentive-oriented reforms can outperform policies targeting teacher ability, given their potential to influence all teachers rather than a subset.

Keywords: Incentives; Teacher Performance; Value-Added; Effort; Ability; Education Production; Accountability; Education Policy; Cost-Effectiveness; Persistence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J24 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: Unknown pages
Date: 2018-06-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm, nep-knm and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/public/workingPapers/tecipa-610.pdf Main Text (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:tor:tecipa:tecipa-610

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics 150 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePEc Maintainer ().