Measuring the Impacts of Teachers: Comment

S-Tier
Journal: American Economic Review
Year: 2017
Volume: 107
Issue: 6
Pages: 1656-84

Score contribution per author:

8.043 = (α=2.01 / 1 authors) × 4.0x S-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014a, b) 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 percent as large, in variance terms, as teachers' causal effects. Long-run results are sensitive to controls and cannot support strong conclusions.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:aea:aecrev:v:107:y:2017:i:6:p:1656-84
Journal Field
General
Author Count
1
Added to Database
2026-01-29