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.

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Citation

Chetty, Raj, John N. Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff. "Measuring the Impacts of the Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates." Working Paper, Columbia Business School, 2014.

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