Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates

By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Jonah E. Rockoff. 2014

1,290 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Are teachersʼ impacts on studentsʼ test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachersʼ causal impacts on student achievement. We test for bias in VA using previously unobserved parent characteristics and a quasi-experimental design based on changes in teaching staff. Using school district and tax records for more than one million children, we find that VA models which control for a studentʼs prior test scores exhibit little bias in forecasting teachersʼ impacts on student achievement.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/302bcbdbc8a7b55d9015a88c311d5eb6716aa817

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Citations in the corpus

Assessing the Effect of School Days and Absences on Test Score Performance. CEP Discussion Paper No. 1302. (2014, result): “This may be due to parents not having the same amount of 85A similar approach has been followed by Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014) but in the context of analyzing long term effects of teacher value added.”
Spending more of the school day in math class: Evidence from a regression discontinuity in middle school (2014, background): “A handful of recent empirical papers, for example Chetty et al. (2011) and Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2013b), document cases where initially large student test score gains decay substantially in the years immediately following treatment, but years later treatment effects re-emerge in longer-run,”
The Design of Teacher Assignment: Theory and Evidence (2015, background): “We distinguish between teachers having only one or two years of experience and more experienced teachers based on evidence that teachers in their first year tend not to perform as well as more experienced teachers (Chetty et al., 2014; Rockoff, 2004).”
What's in a teacher test? Assessing the relationship between teacher licensure test scores and student STEM achievement and course-taking (2016, neutral): “42 Both the Clotfelter et al. (2006) approach and the Horvath (2015) approach drop 91% of middle schools.”
Teacher Effects and Teacher-Related Policies (2014, methodology): “Chetty et al. (2013b) perform what is probably the most realistic simulation, using causal estimates of teacher value added on subsequent earnings, and also accounting for the imperfect relationship between the current value-added estimates used to identify low-performing teachers and subsequent…”
Flexible Wages, Bargaining, and the Gender Gap (2020, positive): “We measure teachers’ quality using value-added (Rivkin et al., 2005; Kane and Staiger, 2008; Chetty et al., 2014), an estimate of each teacher’s contribution to the growth in achievement.”
What Do Test Scores Miss? The Importance of Teacher Effects on Non–Test Score Outcomes (2018, positive): “However, Kane and Staiger (2008), Kane et al. (2013), Chetty et al. (2014b), and Bacher-Hicks, Kane, and Staiger (2015) show that teacher valueadded exhibits no appreciable bias in experimental and quasi-experimental data. what do test scores miss?”
Linking Teacher Quality, Student Attendance, and Student Achievement (2016, positive): “and acceptance as useful measures of teacher effectiveness, though such measures remain controversial (Baker et al. 2010; Chetty et al. 2013; Harris 2011).”
The Misallocation of Pay and Productivity in the Public Sector: Evidence from the Labor Market for Teachers (2017, neutral): “This formulation, conventional in the TVA literature, is similar to those used by Kane and Staiger (2008), Harris and Sass (2006), Chetty et al. (2014a), Chetty et al. (2014b), and Araujo et al. (2014). Like Chetty et al.”
Teacher quality policy when supply matters (2012, background): “These alternative uses may also have positive net benefits: the Chetty et al. (2011) analysis of class size reduction implies a benefit-cost ratio around 2.”