Using School Choice Lotteries to Test Measures of School Effectiveness
By David J. Deming. 2014
148 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Value-added models (VAMs) are increasingly used to measure school effectiveness. Yet random variation in school attendance is necessary to test the validity of VAMs, and to guide the selection of models for measuring causal effects of schools. In this paper, I use random assignment from a public school choice lottery to test the predictive power of VAM specifications. In VAMs with minimal controls and two or more years of prior data, I fail to reject the hypothesis that school effects are unbiased. Overall, many commonly used VAMs are accurate predictors of student achievement gains.
Subfields: Education
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b0b130350b356dcb0d888e4089aaa47034f43c4
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Education
- Christopher R. Walters
- Parag A. Pathak
- Atila Abdulkadiroglu
- Jonathan Schellenberg
- C. Koedel
- Jonah E. Rockoff
- Josh Angrist
- Kata Mihaly
Citations in the corpus
- Value-added modeling: A review (2015, background): “Relatedly, Deming (2014) tests for bias in estimates of school value-added using random school choice lotteries and fails to reject the hypothesis that school effects are unbiased.”
- Student Enrollment Patterns and Achievement in Ohio’s Online Charter Schools (2017, unknown): “Variations of Model 2 have been used to evaluate the effect of teachers, schools, and education policies and practices on students’ achievement and other outcomes (Aaronson, Barrow, & Sander, 2007; Angrist, Hull, Pathak, & Walters, 2016; Deming, 2014; Guarino, Reckase, & Wooldridge, 2015; Hanushek, ”
- Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India (2016, unknown): “The close correspondence here between the VA and IV results adds to much recent evidence that VA estimates typically agree closely with experimental and quasi-experimental estimates (see, for example, Andrabi et al. 2011; Angrist et al. 2015; Chetty et al. 2014; Deming 2014; Deming et al. 2014; Kane”
- Do Parents Value School Effectiveness? (2020, result): “Comparisons to results from admission lotteries indicate that school value-added models accurately predict the impacts of random assignment but are not perfectly unbiased (Deming, 2014; Angrist et al., 2016b, 2017).”
- Explaining Charter School Effectiveness (2013, methodology): “Second, we use a Blinder (1973)-Oaxaca (1973) decomposition to separate the difference in charter effectiveness across areas into a component due to differences in student populations and a component due to differences in effectiveness conditional on student characteristics.”