Jonah Rockoff

The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood

National Bureau of Economic Research · 2011-12-01 · 482 citations

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate largely because of disagreement about (1) whether value-added (VA) provides unbiased estimates of teachers' impacts on student achievement and (2) whether high-VA teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. We address these two issues by analyzing school district data from grades 3-8 for 2.5 million children linked to tax records on parent characteristics and adult…

Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood

National Bureau of Economic Research · 2013-09-01 · 110 citations

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value-added (VA) teachers who raise students' test scores improve students' long-term outcomes. Using school district and tax records for more than one million children, we find that students assigned to high-VA teachers in primary school are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, and are less likely to…

The Causes and Consequences of Test Score Manipulation: Evidence from the New York Regents Examinations

American Economic Journal Applied Economics · 2019-06-27 · 81 citations

We show that the design and decentralized scoring of New York’s high school exit exams—the Regents Examinations—led to systematic manipulation of test scores just below important proficiency cutoffs. Exploiting a series of reforms that eliminated score manipulation, we find heterogeneous effects of test score manipulation on academic outcomes. While inflating a score increases the probability of a student graduating from high school by about 17 percentage points, the probability of taking advanc…

Under Pressure: Job Security, Resource Allocation, and Productivity in Schools under No Child Left Behind

American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 2014-08-01 · 81 citations

We conduct the first nationwide study of incentives under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which requires states to punish schools failing to meet target passing rates on students' standardized exams. States' idiosyncratic policies created variation in the risk of failure among very similar schools in different states, which we use to identify effects of accountability pressure. We find NCLB lowers teachers' perceptions of job security, shifts time towards specialist teachers in high-stakes…

Under Pressure: Job Security, Resource Allocation, and Productivity in Schools Under NCLB

National Bureau of Economic Research · 2011-01-01 · 38 citations

The most sweeping federal education law in decades, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, requires states to administer standardized exams and to punish schools that do not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the fraction of students passing these exams. While the literature on school accountability is well-established, there exists no nationwide study of the strong short-term incentives created by NCLB for schools on the margin of failing AYP. We assemble the first comprehensive, national, s…