Growing concerns over the achievement of U.S. students have led to proposals to reward good teachers and penalize (or fire) bad ones. The leading method for assessing teacher quality is "value added" modeling (VAM), which decomposes students' test scores into components attributed to student heterogeneity and to teacher quality. Implicit in the VAM approach are strong assumptions about the nature of the educational production function and the assignment of students to classrooms. In this paper, I develop falsification tests for three widely used VAM specifications, based on the idea that future teachers cannot influence students' past achievement. In data from North Carolina, each of the VAMs' exclusion restrictions are dramatically violated. In particular, these models indicate large "effects" of 5th grade teachers on 4th grade test score gains. I also find that conventional measures of individual teachers' value added fade out very quickly and are at best weakly related to long-run effects.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
14442.
Length: Date of creation: Oct 2008 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14442
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Find related papers by JEL classification: 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 J33 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Compensation Packages; Payment Methods
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Eric A. Hanushek & John F. Kain & Daniel M. O'Brien & Steven G. Rivkin, 2005.
"The Market for Teacher Quality,"
NBER Working Papers
11154, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Jacobson, Louis S & LaLonde, Robert J & Sullivan, Daniel G, 1993.
"Earnings Losses of Displaced Workers,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 83(4), pages 685-709, September.
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