IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v104y2014i9p2593-2632.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Raj Chetty
  • John N. Friedman
  • Jonah E. Rockoff

Abstract

Are teachers' impacts on students' 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 teachers' 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 student's prior test scores exhibit little bias in forecasting teachers' impacts on student achievement.

Suggested Citation

  • Raj Chetty & John N. Friedman & Jonah E. Rockoff, 2014. "Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(9), pages 2593-2632, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:104:y:2014:i:9:p:2593-2632
    Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.9.2593
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.104.9.2593
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://www.aeaweb.org/aer/app/10409/20120127_app.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://www.aeaweb.org/aer/data/10409/20120127_data.zip
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://www.aeaweb.org/aer/ds/10409/20120127_ds.zip
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jonah E. Rockoff, 2004. "The Impact of Individual Teachers on Student Achievement: Evidence from Panel Data," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(2), pages 247-252, May.
    2. Thomas J. Kane & Douglas O. Staiger, 2008. "Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student Achievement: An Experimental Evaluation," NBER Working Papers 14607, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. A. Colin Cameron & Jonah B. Gelbach & Douglas L. Miller, 2011. "Robust Inference With Multiway Clustering," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(2), pages 238-249, April.
    4. Raj Chetty & John N. Friedman & Jonah E. Rockoff, 2014. "Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(9), pages 2633-2679, September.
    5. repec:mpr:mprres:7330 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Raj Chetty & John N. Friedman & Nathaniel Hilger & Emmanuel Saez & Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach & Danny Yagan, 2011. "How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings? Evidence from Project Star," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 126(4), pages 1593-1660.
    7. Jesse Rothstein, 2009. "Student Sorting and Bias in Value-Added Estimation: Selection on Observables and Unobservables," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 4(4), pages 537-571, October.
    8. Daniel F. McCaffrey & Tim R. Sass & J. R. Lockwood & Kata Mihaly, 2009. "The Intertemporal Variability of Teacher Effect Estimates," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 4(4), pages 572-606, October.
    9. repec:mpr:mprres:7333 is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Cory Koedel & Julian R. Betts, 2011. "Does Student Sorting Invalidate Value-Added Models of Teacher Effectiveness? An Extended Analysis of the Rothstein Critique," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 6(1), pages 18-42, January.
    11. Daniel Aaronson & Lisa Barrow & William Sander, 2007. "Teachers and Student Achievement in the Chicago Public High Schools," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 25(1), pages 95-135.
    12. C. Kirabo Jackson & Elias Bruegmann, 2009. "Teaching Students and Teaching Each Other: The Importance of Peer Learning for Teachers," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 1(4), pages 85-108, October.
    13. Kane, Thomas J. & Rockoff, Jonah E. & Staiger, Douglas O., 2008. "What does certification tell us about teacher effectiveness? Evidence from New York City," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 27(6), pages 615-631, December.
    14. Roland G. Fryer & Steven D. Levitt, 2004. "Understanding the Black-White Test Score Gap in the First Two Years of School," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 86(2), pages 447-464, May.
    15. Josh Kinsler, 2012. "Assessing Rothstein's critique of teacher value‐added models," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 3(2), pages 333-362, July.
    16. Raj Chetty & Nathaniel Hendren & Patrick Kline & Emmanuel Saez, 2014. "Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 129(4), pages 1553-1623.
    17. C. Kirabo Jackson, 2009. "Student Demographics, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from the End of School Desegregation," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 27(2), pages 213-256, April.
    18. Hanushek, Eric, 1971. "Teacher Characteristics and Gains in Student Achievement: Estimation Using Micro Data," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 61(2), pages 280-288, May.
    19. Raj Chetty & John N. Friedman & Jonah E. Rockoff, 2011. "The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood," NBER Working Papers 17699, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Dan Goldhaber & Michael Hansen, 2010. "Using Performance on the Job to Inform Teacher Tenure Decisions," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(2), pages 250-255, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Koedel, Cory & Mihaly, Kata & Rockoff, Jonah E., 2015. "Value-added modeling: A review," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 180-195.
    2. Sean Corcoran & Dan Goldhaber, 2013. "Value Added and Its Uses: Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 8(3), pages 418-434, July.
    3. Dan Goldhaber & Michael Hansen, 2013. "Is it Just a Bad Class? Assessing the Long-term Stability of Estimated Teacher Performance," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 80(319), pages 589-612, July.
    4. Koedel Cory & Leatherman Rebecca & Parsons Eric, 2012. "Test Measurement Error and Inference from Value-Added Models," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 12(1), pages 1-37, November.
    5. Allison Atteberry & Susanna Loeb & James Wyckoff, 2013. "Do First Impressions Matter? Improvement in Early Career Teacher Effectiveness," NBER Working Papers 19096, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Figlio, D. & Karbownik, K. & Salvanes, K.G., 2016. "Education Research and Administrative Data," Handbook of the Economics of Education,, Elsevier.
    7. Rockoff, Jonah E. & Speroni, Cecilia, 2011. "Subjective and objective evaluations of teacher effectiveness: Evidence from New York City," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(5), pages 687-696, October.
    8. Eric S. Taylor & John H. Tyler, 2011. "The Effect of Evaluation on Performance: Evidence from Longitudinal Student Achievement Data of Mid-career Teachers," NBER Working Papers 16877, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Cory Koedel & Mark Ehlert & Eric Parsons & Michael Podgursky, 2012. "Selecting Growth Measures for School and Teacher Evaluations," Working Papers 1210, Department of Economics, University of Missouri.
    10. Araujo P., Maria Daniela & Quis, Johanna Sophie, 2021. "Parents can tell! Evidence on classroom quality differences in German primary schools," BERG Working Paper Series 172, Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group.
    11. Raj Chetty & John N. Friedman & Jonah E. Rockoff, 2011. "The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood," NBER Working Papers 17699, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Araujo P., María Daniela & Quis, Johanna Sophie, 2021. "Teacher Effects in Germany: Evidence from Elementary School," VfS Annual Conference 2021 (Virtual Conference): Climate Economics 242457, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    13. Dan Goldhaber & Roddy Theobald, 2013. "Managing the Teacher Workforce in Austere Times: The Determinants and Implications of Teacher Layoffs," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 8(4), pages 494-527, October.
    14. Goldhaber, Dan & Krieg, John & Theobald, Roddy, 2020. "Effective like me? Does having a more productive mentor improve the productivity of mentees?," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).
    15. C. Kirabo Jackson, 2012. "Non-Cognitive Ability, Test Scores, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from 9th Grade Teachers in North Carolina," NBER Working Papers 18624, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Jonah E. Rockoff & Douglas O. Staiger & Thomas J. Kane & Eric S. Taylor, 2012. "Information and Employee Evaluation: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in Public Schools," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(7), pages 3184-3213, December.
    17. Hanushek, Eric A. & Rivkin, Steven G. & Schiman, Jeffrey C., 2016. "Dynamic effects of teacher turnover on the quality of instruction," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 132-148.
    18. Hanushek, Eric A., 2011. "The economic value of higher teacher quality," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(3), pages 466-479, June.
    19. Goldhaber, Dan & Cowan, James & Walch, Joe, 2013. "Is a good elementary teacher always good? Assessing teacher performance estimates across subjects," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 216-228.
    20. C. Kirabo Jackson, 2014. "Teacher Quality at the High School Level: The Importance of Accounting for Tracks," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 32(4), pages 645-684.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H75 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Government: Health, Education, and Welfare
    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J45 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Public Sector Labor Markets

    Lists

    This item is featured on the following reading lists, Wikipedia, or ReplicationWiki pages:
    1. Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates (AER 2014) in ReplicationWiki

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:104:y:2014:i:9:p:2593-2632. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Michael P. Albert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.