TY  - JOUR
AU  - Jacob,Brian A.
AU  - Lefgren,Lars
TI  - Principals as Agents: Subjective Performance Measurement in Education
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11463
PY  - 2005
Y2  - July 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11463
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11463.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Brian Jacob
Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
University of Michigan
735 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Tel: 734-615-6994
Fax: NA
E-Mail: bajacob@umich.edu

Lars Lefgren
Department of Economics
Brigham Young University
130 Faculty Office Bulding
Provo, UT 84602-2363
Tel: (801) 422-5169
E-Mail: l-lefgren@byu.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2005-07-04
AB  - In this paper, we compare subjective principal assessments of teachers to the traditional determinants of teacher compensation ¡V education and experience ¡V and another potential compensation mechanism -- value-added measures of teacher effectiveness based on student achievement gains.  We find that subjective principal assessments of teachers predict future student achievement significantly better than teacher experience, education or actual compensation, though not as well as value-added teacher quality measures.  In particular, principals appear quite good at identifying those teachers who produce the largest and smallest standardized achievement gains in their schools, but have far less ability to distinguish between teachers in the middle of this distribution and systematically discriminate against male and untenured faculty.  Moreover, we find that a principal¡¦s overall rating of a teacher is a substantially better predictor of future parent requests for that teacher than either the teacher¡¦s experience, education and current compensation or the teacher¡¦s value-added achievement measure.  These findings not only inform education policy, but also shed light on subjective performance assessment more generally.
ER  -