[lbo-talk] Something on Education, something from Cockburn

mart media314159 at yahoo.com
Sun Sep 13 17:57:30 PDT 2009


that teachers have effects on students before they taught them reminds me of the 'delayed choice' experiment of Wheeler.  so maybe this is an example of macroscopic quantum effects.  also, maybe rather than showing the VAM is wrong, maybe these results show the teachers are even more valuable than thought, if they can do that.  

--- On Sun, 9/13/09, Mike Beggs <mikejbeggs at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Mike Beggs <mikejbeggs at gmail.com> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Something on Education, something from Cockburn To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Date: Sunday, September 13, 2009, 8:30 PM

OK, the paper I was talking about is: Jesse Rothstein [2009]: "Teacher quality in educational production: tracking, decay, and student achievement". It's coming out in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and you can get a pdf here: http://www.princeton.edu/~jrothst/published/rothstein_vam_may152009.pdf

Here's the abstract:

Growing concerns over the achievement of U.S. 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 decomposes students' test scores into components 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 are dramatically violated. In particular, these models indicate large "effects" of 5th grade teachers on 4th 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.

Cheers, Mike scandalum.wordpress.com

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 9:30 AM, Mike Beggs <mikejbeggs at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 3:28 AM, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
>> Arnie Duncan's financial aid package to public education has some
>> seriously bad points. The fed Race to the Top program has strings that
>> include provisions to rate teachers by their student's scores on
>> academic achievement levels. State's without this `accountability'
>> provision, can't apply for the money.
>
> There's a paper forthcoming in one of the major economics journals
> which absolutely hammers the idea of using econometric 'value-added
> models' to assess 'teacher quality', especially at an individual
> level. Someone forwarded it to me at work but I can't for the life of
> me remember the author, publication, or track it down with Google
> Scholar or anything (I guess because it hasn't actually been published
> yet). I'll forward the details when back in the office on Monday.
>
> 'Value added models' attempt to strip out the effects of
> socio-economic status, 'prior achievement', etc., everything but the
> variation between teachers, to show the effect of particular teachers
> on student test scores. The basic idea in the paper is to demonstrate
> that substantial 'effects' of teachers  show up on student performance
> _in years before they taught them_, indicating that something is wrong
> - their conclusion is that student allocation to teachers is somehow
> biased in ways that are not captured by the other variables.
>
> Cheers,
> Mike Beggs
> scandalum.wordpress.com
>

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