Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement

Steven Rivkin, Eric A. Hanushek and John Kain

Econometrica, 2005, vol. 73, issue 2, 417-458

Abstract: This paper disentangles the impact of schools and teachers in influencing achievement with special attention given to the potential problems of omitted or mismeasured variables and of student and school selection. Unique matched panel data from the UTD Texas Schools Project permit the identification of teacher quality based on student performance along with the impact of specific, measured components of teachers and schools. Semiparametric lower bound estimates of the variance in teacher quality based entirely on within-school heterogeneity indicate that teachers have powerful effects on reading and mathematics achievement, though little of the variation in teacher quality is explained by observable characteristics such as education or experience. The results suggest that the effects of a costly ten student reduction in class size are smaller than the benefit of moving one standard deviation up the teacher quality distribution, highlighting the importance of teacher effectiveness in the determination of school quality. Copyright The Econometric Society 2005.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (696)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1468-0262.2005.00584.x link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement (1998)
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:ecm:emetrp:v:73:y:2005:i:2:p:417-458

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.economet ... ordering-back-issues

Access Statistics for this article

Econometrica is currently edited by Guido Imbens

More articles in Econometrica from Econometric Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().