Measuring teacher effectiveness for gifted and talented students

This paper investigates the differential effectiveness of teachers across student populations, with a focus on gifted and talented (GT) students. Using data from Los Angeles, we estimate teacher effectiveness (proxied by value-added measures (VAMs) of teachers’ contributions to student achievement growth) for GT students and examine how they are matched to teachers. We additionally estimate VAMs for high- and low-testing students to explore whether GT students are assigned to teachers who are relatively more effective for GT students, or to teachers with broad effectiveness across student groups. Many teachers exhibit similar effectiveness across all subgroups, with particularly strong alignment between GT and high-testing VAMs. This suggests a strong overlap in instructional strengths for high-achieving students, regardless of GT classification. At the same time, a substantial share of teachers show meaningful differences in their relative effectiveness with GT students compared to low-testing students. GT students are consistently assigned to teachers with higher VAMs across all subgroups; however, this alignment is strongest with teachers who are most effective for GT and high-testing students. To a modest extent, GT students are also more likely to be matched to teachers with a relative advantage in teaching GT students compared to their effectiveness with low-testing students.