Assessing the Potential of Using Value-Added Estimates of Teacher Job Performance for Making Tenure Decisions

December 2009
Dan Goldhaber, Michael Hansen

Download Full Report (PDF: 1597 K)

CRPE Working Paper #2009-2

Whether early-career estimates of teacher effectiveness accurately predict later performance is of key interest to those who advocate allowing more individuals to initially enter the teaching profession, and then being more selective about who is allowed to remain. Clearly an assumption underlying this idea is that one can infer to a reasonable degree how well a teacher will perform over her career based on estimates of her early-career effectiveness; this in turn presumes some degree of stability of job performance over time. In this paper we explore the potential for using VAMs to estimate teacher performance. We find little evidence that the variation of teacher effects change over teacher careers, but good evidence that prior year VAM estimates of teacher job performance predict student achievement, even when there is a multi-year lag between the estimated teacher performance and the estimate of student achievement. This finding suggests that VAM teacher effect estimates provide valuable information to consider as a factor in making substantive personnel decisions.