Teacher Value-Added and the Test Score Gender Gap

Andrés García-Echalar (), Sebastián Poblete () and Tomás Rau
Additional contact information
Andrés García-Echalar: Universidad de los Andes
Sebastián Poblete: Northwestern University

No 17054, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper assesses the effect of teachers on the gender gap in student test scores. It combines different empirical strategies from the value-added and labor economics literature to estimate teacher value-added and its contribution to the math and reading gender gaps. We use rich administrative data from Chile, that allows us to follow teachers through different classes in different years. Our main findings indicate that teachers explain up to 18% of student test score variance and help reduce the gender gap in math by 16.9%. The reduction in the math gender gap is greater in voucher schools (16.1%), among students with more educated mothers (24%) and among those with female math teachers (32.2%). We provide evidence supporting a within-class effect instead of sorting (between-class effect). We conduct several tests and robustness checks to assess the reliability of our findings.

Keywords: between and within class variation; test scores gender gap; teacher value-added (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2024-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-gen, nep-lam and nep-ure
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Published - published in: Labour Economics, 2024, 89, 102588

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Journal Article: Teacher value-added and the test score gender gap (2024)
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