Revisiting the Impacts of Teachers

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IZA Seminar

Place: Schaumburg-Lippe-Str. 9, 53113 Bonn

Date: 13.04.2016, 12:15 - 13:30

   

Presentation by 

Jesse Rothstein (University of California, Berkeley)
   

Abstract:

Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014a, 2014b) study value-added
(VA) measures of teacher effectiveness. CFR (2014a) exploits teacher switching as a quasi-experiment, concluding that student sorting creates negligible bias in VA scores. CFR (2014b) finds VA scores are useful proxies for teachers’ effects on students’ long-run outcomes. I successfully reproduce each in North Carolina data. But I find that the quasi-experiment is invalid, as teacher switching is correlated with changes in student preparedness. Adjusting for this, I find moderate bias in VA scores, perhaps 10-35% as large, in variance terms, as teachers’ causal effects. Long-run results are sensitive to controls and cannot support strong conclusions.

   
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