Targeting the Wrong Teachers: Estimating Teacher Quality for Use in Accountability Regimes

Nirav Mehta

No 20143, University of Western Ontario, Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP) Working Papers from University of Western Ontario, Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP)

Abstract: This paper compares the performance of popular estimators of teacher quality, which serve as inputs into teacher incentive schemes. I model an administrator tasked with categorizing teachers with respect to an exogenous cutoff showing that the preferred estimator depends on the relationship between teacher quality and class size. I then use data from Los Angeles to show that the simpler fixed effects estimator would outperform the more popular empirical Bayes estimator, meaning that the administrator would prefer to use it to either reward high-performing teachers or sanction low-performing ones. The preferred estimator would create 200 fewer classification errors.

Keywords: None. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1099&context=economicscibc (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

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:uwo:hcuwoc:20143

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://economics.uw ... itting_ordering.html
The price is Paper copy available by mail at a cost of $10.00 Canadian each.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Western Ontario, Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP) Working Papers from University of Western Ontario, Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP) Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP), Social Science Centre, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5C2.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().