28 Nov
2011
28 Nov
'11
2:43 a.m.
Dear all,
Please join us for the last Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) of the
semester this Wednesday, November 30 from 12.00 - 1.30 pm in CGIS Knafel
Room 354. John Friedman, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the
Harvard Kennedy School, will give a presentation entitled "The Long-Term
Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Students' Outcomes in
Adulthood". As always, a light lunch will be provided.
Abstract:
*The use of test-score-based "value-added" (VA) measures to evaluate
teachers is controversial, among other reasons, because (1) there is little
evidence on whether high VA teachers improve student outcomes in adulthood
and (2) there is debate about whether VA measures provide unbiased
estimates of teacher quality. We address these issues by analyzing school
district data from grades 3-8 for 2.5 million children linked to data on
parents and adult outcomes from tax records. We find that the degree of
bias due to selection is small using tests based on previously unobserved
parent characteristics and a new quasi-experimental research design based
on changes in teaching staff. We then show that high VA teachers increase
their students' probability of college attendance, raise earnings, reduce
teenage birth rates, and improve the quality of the neighborhood in which
their students live in adulthood. The impacts of teacher VA are roughly
constant across grades 4-8. A one standard deviation improvement in teacher
VA in a single grade raises earnings by 1% at age 28. Replacing a teacher
whose VA is in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase
students' lifetime income by approximately $300,000 for the average
classroom in our sample.*
An up-to-date schedule for the workshop is available at
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/events/node/1208.
Best,
Konstantin
--
Konstantin Kashin
Ph.D. Student in Government
Harvard University
Mobile: 978-844-0538
E-mail: kkashin(a)fas.harvard.edu
Site: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~kkashin/