Principals as Agents: Subjective Performance Measurement in Education / Brian A. Jacob, Lars Lefgren.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jacob, Brian A.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Lefgren, Lars.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w11463.

NBER working paper series no. w11463

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Principals as Agents

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2005.

Summary:

In this paper, we compare subjective principal assessments of teachers to the traditional determinants of teacher compensation ¡V education and experience ¡V and another potential compensation mechanism -- value-added measures of teacher effectiveness based on student achievement gains. We find that subjective principal assessments of teachers predict future student achievement significantly better than teacher experience, education or actual compensation, though not as well as value-added teacher quality measures. In particular, principals appear quite good at identifying those teachers who produce the largest and smallest standardized achievement gains in their schools, but have far less ability to distinguish between teachers in the middle of this distribution and systematically discriminate against male and untenured faculty. Moreover, we find that a principal¡'s overall rating of a teacher is a substantially better predictor of future parent requests for that teacher than either the teacher¡'s experience, education and current compensation or the teacher¡'s value-added achievement measure. These findings not only inform education policy, but also shed light on subjective performance assessment more generally.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2005.