Sensitivity of Teacher Value-Added Estimates to Student and Peer Control Variables

Sensitivity of Teacher Value-Added Estimates to Student and Peer Control Variables

The validity of value-added models (VAMs) of teacher effectiveness depends on the ability of the measures to isolate teachers’ contributions to their students’ achievement. Existing VAMs differ in key aspects of their empirical specifications, however, leaving policymakers with little clear guidance on what factors are important to include when constructing a fair model. We examine the sensitiv...

Are Teacher-Level Value-Added Estimates Biased? An Experimental Validation of Non-Experimental Estimates

For more than three decades, analyses of non-experimental data have reported considerable heterogeneity in teacher impacts on student achievement. We use data from a random-assignment experiment in Los Angeles Unified School District to test the validity of various non-experimental specifications. To do so, we first generated estimates for a group of teachers during a pre-experimental period an...

Teacher heterogeneity , value added and education policy ∗

This study examines the theoretical and practical implications of ranking teachers with a one-dimensional metric when teacher effectiveness varies across subjects or student types. We document the empirical failure of standard value-added assumptions of teacher input homogeneity, but demonstrate that previously suggested teacher firing policies still improve student welfare, although they resul...

a comparison of teachers and supervisors, with respect to teacher efficacy and reflection

supervisors play an undeniable role in training teachers, before starting their professional experience by preparing them, at the initial years of their teaching by checking their work within the proper framework, and later on during their teaching by assessing their progress. but surprisingly, exploring their attributes, professional demands, and qualifications has remained a neglected theme i...

Impediments to the estimation of teacher value added Steven