Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/93312 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 7973
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
School districts and state departments of education frequently must choose between a variety of methods to estimating teacher quality. This paper examines under what circumstances the decision between estimators of teacher quality is important. We examine estimates derived from growth percentile measures and estimates derived from commonly used value-added estimators. Using simulated data, we examine how well the estimators can rank teachers and avoid misclassification errors under a variety of assignment scenarios of teachers to students. We find that growth percentile measures perform worse than value-added measures that control for prior year student test scores and control for teacher fixed effects when assignment of students to teachers is nonrandom. In addition, using actual data from a large diverse anonymous state, we find evidence that growth percentile measures are less correlated with value-added measures with teacher fixed effects when there is evidence of nonrandom grouping of students in schools. This evidence suggests that the choice between estimators is most consequential under nonrandom assignment of teachers to students, and that value-added measures controlling for teacher fixed effects may be better suited to estimating teacher quality in this case.
Subjects: 
teacher labor markets
teacher value-added
teacher quality
JEL: 
I20
J08
J24
J45
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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