Ranking Teachers when Teacher Value-Added is Heterogeneous Across Students

Brian Stacy

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: The typical measure used by researchers and school administrators to evaluate teachers is based on how the students' achievement increases after being exposed to the teacher, or based on the teacher's "value-added''. When teacher value-added is heterogeneous across her students, the typically used measure reflects differences in the average value-added the teacher provides. However, researchers, administrators, and parents may care not just about the average value-added, but also its dispersion. In this paper, I examine the robustness of typical teacher quality measures to alternate ranking systems factoring in the variance of value-added. Encouragingly, ranking systems factoring in the variance produce similar rankings as the ranking system based only on the mean. I also examine whether classroom characteristics and teacher experience affect a teacher's value-added variance and find that they explain little of the variation in value-added variances.

Keywords: teacher value-added; heterogeneity; value-added variance; teacher quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I0 I20 I21 I28 J01 J08 J24 J44 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-12-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:esprep:104743

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