Hello, We hope you will join us next Wednesday, April 7th at the Applied Statistics workshop when we will be happy to have Thomas Kane from the Graduate School of Education and currently at the Gates Foundation. Details, abstract and a link to the paper are below. In addition, Thomas asked that I include a link to a contrasting paper that comes to a different conclusion than his own. Part of the talk will be about the reconciliation of these two lines of research. A light lunch will be served. Thanks! "Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student Achievement: An Experimental Approach" Thomas J. Kane Graduate School of Education April 7th, 2010, 12 noon K354 CGIS Knafel (1737 Cambridge St) Abstract: We used a random-assignment experiment in Los Angeles Unified School District to evaluate various non-experimental methods for estimating teacher effects on student test scores. Having estimated teacher effects during a pre-experimental period, we used these estimates to predict student achievement following random assignment of teachers to classrooms. While all of the teacher effect estimates we considered were significant predictors of student achievement under random assignment, those that controlled for prior student test scores yielded unbiased predictions and those that further controlled for mean classroom characteristics yielded the best prediction accuracy. In both the experimental and non-experimental data, we found that teacher effects faded out by roughly 50 percent per year in the two years following teacher assignment. Thomas's paper: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic646669.files/kane%20and%20staige… Rothenstein paper: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic646669.files/rothstein_teacher_e… Cheers, matt. ~~~~~~~~~~~ Matthew Blackwell PhD Candidate Institute for Quantitative Social Science Department of Government Harvard University email: mblackwell(a)iq.harvard.edu url: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~blackwel/