A student’s teacher and their peers are two of most significant drivers of their human capital, which has led to teacher effectiveness and peer effects being two of the most studied topics in the economics of education. My focus on these topics started with a paper that combined the two literatures and showed that the impact of teachers extends beyond the students in their classrooms. I have since continued to do work on both teacher effectiveness and peer effects, with my papers/abstracts listed below:
Academic Publications:
Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education, American Economic Review, March 2019, 109(3): 1080-1115
Short Summaries: RAND Research Brief; AEA Research Highlights
Abstract: Does the impact of teachers extend beyond the students in their classroom? Using the natural transitions of students from multiple elementary schools into a single middle school, this paper provides a new method for isolating and quantifying peer spillover effects of teaching and shows that ignoring these spillovers underestimates a teacher's value by at least 30%. Because the spillovers also affect teacher value-added estimates, I develop a method of moments estimator of teacher value-added and show that accounting for the spillovers does not have a large impact on the ranking of teachers in New York City. I conclude by showing that the spillovers occur within groups of students who share the same race and gender, which suggests that social networks play a critical role in disseminating the effect.
Optimal Allocation of Spots in the Presence of Peer Effects: Evidence a Job Training Program (with Matthew D. Baird and John Engberg), Journal of Labor Economics, April 2023, 41(2): 479-509
Abstract: We consider the case in which the number of seats in a program is limited, such as a job training program or a supplemental tutoring program, and explore the implications that peer effects have for which individuals should be assigned to the limited seats. In the frequently-studied case in which all applicants are assigned to a group, the average outcome is not changed by shuffling the group assignments if the peer effect is linear in the average composition of peers. However, when there are fewer seats than applicants, the presence of linear-in-means peer effects can dramatically influence the optimal choice of who gets to participate. We illustrate how peer effects impact optimal seat assignment, first under a general social planner utility function and then from both an efficiency and an equity perspective. We next use data from a recent job training RCT to provide evidence of large peer effects in the context of job training for disadvantaged adults. Finally, we combine the two results to show that the program's effectiveness varies greatly depending on whether the assignment choices account for or ignore peer effects.
Working Papers:
Screening with Multitasking: Theory and Empirical Evidence from Teacher Tenure Reform (with Michael Dinerstein) [R&R at Journal of Political Economy]
Abstract: What happens when employers screen their employees but only observe a subset of output? We specify a model with heterogeneous employees and show that their response to the screening affects output in both the probationary period and the post-probationary period. The post-probationary impact is due to their heterogeneous responses affecting which individuals are retained, thereby causing the policy to implicitly also screen on the teachers' post-probationary production of the unobserved output. We then assess this prediction empirically by studying a change to teacher tenure policy in New York City, which increased the role that a single measure -- test score value-added -- played in tenure decisions. We show that in response to the policy, teachers increased test score value-added and decreased output that did not enter the tenure decision. Importantly, the increase in test score value-added was largest for the teachers with more ability to improve students' untargeted outcomes, increasing their likelihood of getting tenure. We then use these results to study how the policy affected average output of the first affected cohort of teachers and show that their response to the policy reduced average output in the early years of their careers, but later improved the benefit of screening by 30%. Thus, their response effectively shifted some of the cost of partial observability from the post-tenure period to the pre-tenure period.
Measuring and Summarizing the Multiple Dimensions of Teacher Effectiveness (with Christine Mulhern) [R&R at AEJ:Policy]
Abstract: There is an emerging consensus that teachers impact multiple student outcomes, but it remains unclear how to measure and summarize the multiple dimensions of teacher effectiveness into simple metrics for research or personnel decisions. We present a multidimensional empirical Bayes framework and illustrate how to use noisy estimates of teacher effectiveness to assess the dimensionality and predictive power of teachers’ true effects. We find that it is possible to efficiently summarize many dimensions of effectiveness and most summary measures lead to similar teacher rankings; however, focusing on any one specific measure alone misses important dimensions of teacher quality.
Resting Working Papers and Other Links:
Am I Good Enough? Understanding How Teachers' Assessment of Their Own Practice Depends on the Context (with Kata Mihaly)
Abstract: We analyze survey responses from teachers who were asked to rate themselves on a formal observation rubric used in a high-stakes evaluation system. Our analysis reveals three findings. First, the data show that teachers generally agree with their principal's assessment of their ability. Second, we find that teachers' self-ratings are positively correlated with their value-added scores; however, this correlation disappears after conditioning on the principals' ratings. Finally, we show that teachers in high-poverty, low-achieving schools tend to rate themselves worse than teachers in schools with low-poverty, high-achieving student bodies, and this finding holds true even when we compare teachers with the same principal ratings or value-added scores. This last finding suggests that teachers internalize factors outside of their control when evaluating their own performance.
Measuring Teacher Effectiveness: A Resource for Teachers, Administrators, Policymakers, and Parents:
Description: RAND Corporation's website, which contains accessible summaries of topics related to teacher effectiveness, a handful of which were written by me.
Works in Progress:
Are Teachers More than a Collection of Teachers? Joint Estimation of Teacher and School Value-Added
Personnel Policy with Varying Signal Strengths
Causal Inference with High-Dimensional Treatments