Education Commons^™

Disentangling Disadvantage: Can We Distinguish Good Teaching From Classroom Composition?, Gema Zamarro, John Engberg, Juan Saavedra, Jennifer Steele

Gema Zamarro

This article investigates the use of teacher value-added estimates to assess the distribution of effective teaching across students of varying socioeconomic disadvantage in the presence of classroom composition effects. We examine, via simulations, how accurately commonly used teacher value-added estimators recover the rank correlation between true and estimated teacher effects and a parameter representing the distribution of effective teaching. We consider various scenarios of teacher assignment, within-teacher variability in classroom composition, the importance of classroom com- position effects, and the presence of student unobserved heterogeneity. No single model recovers without bias estimates of the distribution parameter in all the scenarios …