Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Opper, Isaac M.
• 署名单位: RAND Corporation
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.20161226
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 1080-1115
• 关键词: EFFECTIVE TEACHERS; impacts; achievement; QUALITY; lotteries; STABILITY; POLICY; bad

摘要

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 percent. 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.