文档介绍：TEACHER QUALITY IN EDUCATIONAL PRODUCTION:
TRACKING, DECAY, AND STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT∗
JESSE ROTHSTEIN
Growing concerns over the inadequate achievement of . 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 poses students’ test scores ponents 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 is dramatically violated. In particular, these
models indicate large “effects” of fifth grade teachers on fourth 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. I discuss
implications for the use of VAMs as personnel tools.
I. INTRODUCTION
Parallel literatures in labor economics and education adopt
similar econometric strategies for identifying the effects of firms
on wages and of teachers on student test scores. es are
modeled as the sum of firm or teacher effect, individual hetero-
geneity, and transitory, orthogonal error. The resulting estimates
of firm effects are used to gauge the relative importance of firm
and worker heterogeneity in the determination of wages. In ed-
ucation, so-called “value added” models (hereafter, VAMs) have
been used to measure the importance of teacher quality to educa-
tional production, to assess teacher preparation and certification
programs, and as important inputs to personnel evaluations and
merit pay
∗Earlier versions of this paper circulated under the title “D