Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student Achievement: An Experimental Evaluation

Thomas J. Kane and Doug Staiger

No 14607, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We used a random-assignment experiment in Los Angeles Unified School District to evaluate various non-experimental methods for estimating teacher effects on student test scores. Having estimated teacher effects during a pre-experimental period, we used these estimates to predict student achievement following random assignment of teachers to classrooms. While all of the teacher effect estimates we considered were significant predictors of student achievement under random assignment, those that controlled for prior student test scores yielded unbiased predictions and those that further controlled for mean classroom characteristics yielded the best prediction accuracy. In both the experimental and non-experimental data, we found that teacher effects faded out by roughly 50 percent per year in the two years following teacher assignment.

JEL-codes: I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-exp, nep-lab and nep-ure
Note: CH ED LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (388)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14607.pdf (application/pdf)

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14607

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14607

Access Statistics for this paper

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