Taking Teacher Evaluation to Scale: The Effect of State Reforms on Achievement and Attainment / Joshua Bleiberg, Eric Brunner, Erica Harbatkin, Matthew A. Kraft, Matthew G. Springer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bleiberg, Joshua.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Brunner, Eric.

Harbatkin, Erica.

Kraft, Matthew A.

Springer, Matthew G.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w30995.

NBER working paper series no. w30995

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2023.

Summary:

Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting the staggered timing of implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on average, that rule out impacts as small as 0.015 standard deviation for achievement and 1 percentage point for high school graduation and college enrollment. We also find little evidence that the effect of teacher evaluation reforms varied by system design rigor, specific design features or student and district characteristics. We highlight five factors that may have undercut the efficacy of teacher evaluation reforms at scale: political opposition, the decentralized structure of U.S. public education, capacity constraints, limited generalizability, and the lack of increased teacher compensation to offset the non-pecuniary costs of lower job satisfaction and security.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2023.