Assessing Rothstein's critique of teacher value‐added models
By Josh Kinsler. 2012
56 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Value-added models of teacher effectiveness yield consistent estimates of teacher quality under the assumption that students are randomly assigned to classrooms conditional on ability. Rothstein (2010) tested and rejected this underlying sorting assumption, casting doubt on the usefulness of the value-added framework. In this paper, I illustrate that the falsification tests employed by Rothstein perform quite poorly in small samples and I propose an alternative testing strategy that is less sensitive to sample size. I also show that none of the proposed falsification tests works well when the achievement production function is misspecified. Finally, I return to the same North Carolina sample employed by Rothstein and retest the assumption of conditional random assignment. Once I account for the “smallness” of the data and allowteacher inputs to persist at reasonable rates, I fail to reject conditional random assignment. Keywords. Teacher value-added, model testing. JEL classification. I20, C10.
Subfields: Education
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cae65a92b679d63e2130a6898292ab61b2a218c6
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In Education
- C. Koedel
- Jonah E. Rockoff
- Ian M. Schmutte
- Kata Mihaly
- Dan Goldhaber
- Josh Kinsler
- David Blazar
- Douglas N. Harris
Citations in the corpus
- Non-Cognitive Ability, Test Scores, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from 9th Grade Teachers in North Carolina (2012, unknown): “While many studies rely on the assumption that teachers are randomly assigned to students conditional on incoming test scores (Koedel & Betts, 2011; Kinsler, 2012; Kane & Staiger, 2008), the key identifying assumption in this paper is that teachers are randomly assigned to students within…”
- Value-added modeling: A review (2015, background): “In addition, Kinsler (2012) shows that Rothstein’s tests perform poorly with small samples, Koedel and Betts (2011) show that his results are driven in part by non-persistent student–teacher sorting, and Chetty, Friedman, & Rockoff (2014a) show that the issues he raises become less significant if…”
- Job Referral Networks and the Determination of Earnings in Local Labor Markets (2014, background): “Kinsler (2012) fails to reject the exogenous mobility assumption in education data after accounting for sample size and model misspecification.”
- Teacher Effects and Teacher-Related Policies (2014, unknown): “Additional papers present simulation evidence that Rothstein's test performs poorly in small samples (Goldhaber & Chaplin 2012; Kinsler 2012).”