Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates

Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah E. Rockoff

American Economic Review, 2014, vol. 104, issue 9, 2593-2632

Abstract: Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachers' causal impacts on student achievement. We test for bias in VA using previously unobserved parent characteristics and a quasi-experimental design based on changes in teaching staff. Using school district and tax records for more than one million children, we find that VA models which control for a student's prior test scores exhibit little bias in forecasting teachers' impacts on student achievement.

JEL-codes: H75 I21 J24 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.9.2593
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (522)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates (2014)
Working Paper: Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates (2013)
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