Principals as Agents: Subjective Performance Measurement in Education

Brian A. Jacob and Lars Lefgren ()

No 11463, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In this paper, we compare subjective principal assessments of teachers to the traditional determinants of teacher compensation ¡V education and experience ¡V and another potential compensation mechanism -- value-added measures of teacher effectiveness based on student achievement gains. We find that subjective principal assessments of teachers predict future student achievement significantly better than teacher experience, education or actual compensation, though not as well as value-added teacher quality measures. In particular, principals appear quite good at identifying those teachers who produce the largest and smallest standardized achievement gains in their schools, but have far less ability to distinguish between teachers in the middle of this distribution and systematically discriminate against male and untenured faculty. Moreover, we find that a principal¡¦s overall rating of a teacher is a substantially better predictor of future parent requests for that teacher than either the teacher¡¦s experience, education and current compensation or the teacher¡¦s value-added achievement measure. These findings not only inform education policy, but also shed light on subjective performance assessment more generally.

JEL-codes: I0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
Date: 2005-07
Note: CH ED
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11463.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11463

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11463
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

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