Taking Teacher Evaluation to Scale: The Effect of State Reforms on Achievement and Attainment

Joshua Bleiberg, Eric Brunner, Erica Harbatkin, Matthew Kraft and Matthew Springer

No 30995, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting the staggered timing of implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on average, that rule out impacts as small as 0.015 standard deviation for achievement and 1 percentage point for high school graduation and college enrollment. We also find little evidence that the effect of teacher evaluation reforms varied by system design rigor, specific design features or student and district characteristics. We highlight five factors that may have undercut the efficacy of teacher evaluation reforms at scale: political opposition, the decentralized structure of U.S. public education, capacity constraints, limited generalizability, and the lack of increased teacher compensation to offset the non-pecuniary costs of lower job satisfaction and security.

JEL-codes: I20 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-03
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