This paper clarifies four areas of confusion about value-added methodology and its role in teacher evaluation: (1) use of value-added information; (2) consequences for teachers versus those for students of classifying and misclassifying teachers as effective or ineffective; (3) reliability of...

In an influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) shows that standard value-added models (VAMs) suggest implausible and large future teacher effects on past student achievement. This is the basis of a falsification test that appears to indicate bias in typical VAM estimates of teacher...

Data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS:88) were used to investigate the effect of teacher licensure status on private school students' 12th grade math and science test scores. This data includes schooling and family background information on students that can be...

Over 2,000 teachers in the state of Washington received reduction-in-force (RIF) notices across the 2008–09 and 2009–10 school years. We link data on these RIF notices to an administrative data set that includes student, teacher, school, and district variables to determine the factors that...

This report addresses the comparison of teacher evaluation systems and proposes ways to achieve a uniform standard for dispensing funds to districts to recognize exceptional teachers without imposing a uniform evaluation system on those districts. The report provides practical procedures to...