The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A...

This paper investigates how the precision and stability of a teacher's value-added estimate relates to the characteristics of the teacher's students. Using a large administrative data set and a variety of teacher value-added estimators, it finds that the stability over time of teacher...

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A...

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A...

This paper investigates how the precision and stability of a teacher's value-added estimate relates to the characteristics of the teacher's students. Using a large administrative data set and a variety of teacher value-added estimators, it finds that the stability over time of teacher...

The typical measure used by researchers and school administrators to evaluate teachers is based on how the students' achievement increases after being exposed to the teacher, or based on the teacher's "value-added''. When teacher value-added is heterogeneous across her students, the typically...

We study the properties of two specification tests that have been applied to a variety of estimators in the context of value-added measures (VAMs) of teacher and school quality: the Hausman test for choosing between random and fixed effects and a test for feedback (sometimes called a...

This paper studies the effects of financial distress on workers' productivity. We use detailed data from the public school system in Texas, which allow us to exploit within-teacher variation and to control for a student's economic environment. We show that student performance decreases by 6.5%...

Researchers commonly "shrink" raw quality measures based on statistical criteria. This paper studies when and how this transformation's statistical properties would confer economic benefits to a utility-maximizing decisionmaker, for many asymmetric information environments. The presence of an...

Researchers commonly "shrink" raw quality measures based on statistical criteria. This paper studies when and how this transformation's statistical properties would confer economic benefits to a utility-maximizing decisionmaker, for many asymmetric information environments. The presence of an...