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...

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...

We investigate whether commonly used value-added estimation strategies can produce accurate estimates of teacher effects. We estimate teacher effects in simulated student achievement data sets that mimic plausible types of student grouping and teacher assignment scenarios. No one method...

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 value‐added measures (VAMs) of performance as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely...

Empirical Bayes’s (EB) estimation has become a popular procedure used to calculate teacher value added, often as a way to make imprecise estimates more reliable. In this article, we review the theory of EB estimation and use simulated and real student achievement data to study the ability...

Many empirical questions in economics and other social sciences depend on causal effects of programs or policies. In the last two decades much research has been done on the econometric and statistical analysis of the effects of such programs or treatments. This recent theoretical literature has...

In this paper we study doubly robust estimators of various average treatment effects under unconfoundedness. We unify and extend much of the recent literature by providing a very general identification result which covers binary and multi-valued treatments; unnormalized and normalized weighting;...

We investigate whether commonly used value-added estimation strategies produce accurate estimates of teacher effects under a variety of scenarios. We estimate teacher effects in simulated student achievement data sets that mimic plausible types of student grouping and teacher assignment...