Education Policy Breakfast Series
Teacher Quality/Effectiveness: Defining,
Developing, and Assessing Policies and Practices
Part III: Setting Policies around Teacher
Quality/Effectiveness – and the Consequences
Friday, April 27, 2012
Kimmel Center for University Life
Recommended Readings from David Steiner
Evaluating Teachers: The Important Role of Value-Added
Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, November 2010
Susanna Loeb, Stanford; Dan Goldhaber, University of Washington; et al.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The evaluation of teachers based on the contribution they make to the learning of their students, value-added, is
an increasingly popular but controversial education reform policy. We highlight and try to clarify four areas of
confusion about value-added. The first is between value-added information and the uses to which it can be put.
One can, for example, be in favor of an evaluation system that includes value-added information without
endorsing the release to the public of value-added data on individual teachers. The second is between the
consequences for teachers vs. those for students of classifying and misclassifying teachers as effective or
ineffective — the interests of students are not always perfectly congruent with those of teachers. The third is
between the reliability of value-added measures of teacher performance and the standards for evaluations in
other fields — value-added scores for individual teachers turn out to be about as reliable as performance
assessments used elsewhere for high stakes decisions. The fourth is between the reliability of teacher
evaluation systems that include value-added vs. those that do not — ignoring value-added typically lowers the
reliability of personnel decisions about teachers.
Recommended Readings from David Steiner
Does Student Sorting Invalidate Value-Added Models of Teacher
Effectiveness? An Extended Analysis of the Rothstein Critique
National Bureau of Economic Research, April 2009
Cory Koedel, University of Missouri; and Julian R. Betts, University of
California, San Diego
ABSTRACT
Value-added modeling continues to gain traction as a tool for measuring teacher performance. However, recent
research (Rothstein, 2009) questions the validity of the value-added approach by showing that it does not mitigate
student-teacher sorting bias (its presumed primary benefit). Our study explores this critique in more detail.
Although we find that estimated teacher effects from some value-added models are severely biased, we also
show that a sufficiently complex value-added model that evaluates teachers over multiple years reduces the
sorting-bias problem to statistical insignificance.
Recommended Readings from David Steiner
Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student Achievement: An Experimental
Evaluation
NBER Working Paper Series, December 2008
Thomas J. Kane, Harvard; and Douglas O. Staiger, Dartmouth
ABSTRACT
We used a random-assignment experiment in Los Angeles Unified School District to evaluate various nonexperimental methods for estimating teacher effects on student test scores. Having estimated teacher effects
during a pre-experimental period, we used these estimates to predict student achievement following random
assignment of teachers to classrooms. While all of the teacher effect estimates we considered were significant
predictors of student achievement under random assignment, those that controlled for prior student test scores
yielded unbiased predictions and those that further controlled for mean classroom characteristics yielded the
best prediction accuracy. In both the experimental and non-experimental data, we found that teacher effects
faded out by roughly 50 percent per year in the two years following teacher assignment.
Education Policy Breakfast Series
Please visit http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/podcast/ed_policy, where
copies of these articles will be posted soon. You may also watch
videos and review presentations from previous breakfasts in this
year’s series.