TY  - JOUR
AU  - Rothstein,Jesse
TI  - Teacher Quality in Educational Production:  Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14442
PY  - 2008
Y2  - October 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14442
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14442.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jesse Rothstein
Goldman School of Public Policy
University of California, Berkeley
2607 Hearst Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94720-7320
Tel: 510/643-8561
Fax: 510/643-9657
E-Mail: rothstein@berkeley.edu
AB  - Growing concerns over the achievement of U.S. students have led to proposals to reward good teachers and penalize (or fire) bad ones. The leading method for assessing teacher quality is "value added" modeling (VAM), which decomposes students' test scores into components attributed to student heterogeneity and to teacher quality. Implicit in the VAM approach are strong assumptions about the nature of the educational production function and the assignment of students to classrooms. In this paper, I develop falsification tests for three widely used VAM specifications, based on the idea that future teachers cannot influence students' past achievement. In data from North Carolina, each of the VAMs' exclusion restrictions are dramatically violated. In particular, these models indicate large "effects" of 5th grade teachers on 4th grade test score gains. I also find that conventional measures of individual teachers' value added fade out very quickly and are at best weakly related to long-run effects.
ER  -