Using Performance on the Job to Inform Teacher Tenure Decisions

• Activity Number: 59
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 1, 2010 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Dan Goldhaber*+ and Michael Hansen
• Companies: University of Washington and The Urban Institute
• Keywords: value-added modeling

Abstract

Currently some researchers and policy makers advocate allowing more individuals to enter the teaching profession, and then being more selective about who is retained. Key to this idea is the assumption that a teacher's performance over her career can be predicted reasonably well from early-career estimates of effectiveness; this in turn presumes some degree of stability of job performance over time. This paper explores the potential for using VAMs to estimate teacher performance. We find little evidence that the variation of teacher effects changes over teacher careers, but good evidence that VAM estimates of teacher job performance predict future students' achievement, even when there is a multi- year lag between the VAM estimates and the measure of student achievement. This suggests that VAM estimates provide valuable information to consider when making substantive personnel decisions.