Measuring the Impacts of Teachers: Comment

Jesse Rothstein

Department of Economics, Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley

Abstract: Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014a, b) study value-added (VA) measures of teacher effectiveness. CFR (2014a) exploits teacher switching as a quasi-experiment, concluding that student sorting creates negligible bias in VA scores. CFR (2014b) finds VA scores are useful proxies for teachers' effects on students' long-run outcomes. I successfully reproduce each in North Carolina data. But I find that the quasi-experiment is invalid, as teacher switching is correlated with changes in student preparedness. Adjusting for this, I find moderate bias in VA scores, perhaps 10-35 percent as large, in variance terms, as teachers' causal effects. Long-run results are sensitive to controls and cannot support strong conclusions.

Keywords: Economics; Commerce; Management; Tourism and Services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-06-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/0bt6r8br.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring the Impacts of Teachers: Comment (2017)
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:cdl:econwp:qt0bt6r8br

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics, Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().