Working Paper: NBER ID: w29555
Authors: Michael Gilraine; Nolan G. Pope
Abstract: Teacher value-added (VA) measures how teachers improve their students' contemporaneous test scores. Many teachers, however, argue that contemporaneous test scores are a poor proxy for their permanent influence on students. This paper considers a new VA measure -- 'long-run VA' -- that captures teachers' contributions that persist by replacing contemporaneous test scores with subsequent test scores in VA estimation. We find that students assigned to high long-run VA teachers fare substantially better in terms of long-term outcomes. Policy simulations indicate that the use of long-run VA improves policy effectiveness by a factor of two compared to traditional VA measures.
Keywords: teacher value-added; longrun outcomes; education policy
JEL Codes: I20; J24; J45
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| improving teacher quality by focusing on longrun VA (I21) | enhanced educational policy effectiveness (I28) |
| longrun VA (C29) | improved subsequent test scores (I24) |
| longrun VA (C29) | long-term academic outcomes (I21) |
| longrun VA (C29) | noncognitive VA (C52) |
| longrun VA (C29) | future success (P17) |
| standard VA (L95) | diluted predictive power for long-term outcomes (C41) |