New Publication: "Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale"

Assistant Professor Emily Penner is co-author on Working Paper No. 26480, released November 2019 by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The title of the paper is "Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale."

​Co-authors are Marianne Bitler (first author, Penn State University), Sean Corcoran (Vanderbilt University), and Thurston Domina (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill).

Dr. Penner's research focuses on educational inequality and policy, and considers the ways that policies, districts, schools, teachers, peers, and parents can contribute to or ameliorate educational inequality. She is currently involved in projects examining teacher recruitment and retention in constrained labor and housing markets, how curriculum placement policies affect student learning, and how state accountability policies might affect school-level supports under the Every Student Succeeds Act.  

Abstract

Estimates of teacher “value-added” suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the validity of value-added models. Using administrative student data from New York City, we apply commonly estimated value-added models to an outcome teachers cannot plausibly affect: student height. We find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and reading achievement, raising obvious questions about validity. Subsequent analysis finds these “effects” are largely spurious variation (noise), rather than bias resulting from sorting on unobserved factors related to achievement. Given the difficulty of differentiating signal from noise in real-world teacher effect estimates, this paper serves as a cautionary tale for their use in practice. ​