Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement

Jesse Rothstein

No 1058, Working Papers from Princeton University, School of Public and International Affairs, Education Research Section.

Abstract: An emerging consensus holds that teacher quality is an extremely important determinant of student achievement and a promising lever by which educational outcomes can be improved. "Value-Added Models" (VAMs) attempt to distinguish good from bad teachers, using observational data to measure teachers' effects on student achievement. I develop falsification tests for the assumptions about student-to-teacher assignments on which VAMs rely, using the idea that teachers in later grades cannot have causal effects in students' test scores in earlier grades. A simple VAM indicates that 5th grade teachers have nearly as large "effects" on 4th grade gains as on 5th grade gains, implying that assignments are not ignorable. An extension of this test shows that VAMs that allow for tracking on the basis of students' permanent ability are similiarly misspecified: Teacher assignments evidently respond dynamicallt to year-to-year fluctuations in student achievement. I propose models of the assignment process that permit identification. Estimates that are consistant in the presence of (some forms of) dynamic tracking yield very different assessments of teacher quality than those obtained from common VAMs. VAMs need further development and validation before they can support causal interpretations or policy applications.

JEL-codes: H75 I21 J24 J33 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-05
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

Downloads: (external link)
https://dataspace.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/dsp01bc386j24j/1/25ers.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Internal Server Error

Related works:
Journal Article: Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement (2010)
Working Paper: Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement (2008)
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:pri:edures:25

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Princeton University, School of Public and International Affairs, Education Research Section. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bobray Bordelon ().