Using School Choice Lotteries to Test Measures of School Effectiveness

No 19803, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Value-added models (VAMs) are increasingly used to measure school effectiveness. Yet random variation in school attendance is necessary to test the validity of VAMs, and to guide the selection of models for measuring causal effects of schools. In this paper, I use random assignment from a public school choice lottery to test the predictive power of VAM specifications. In VAMs with minimal controls and two or more years of prior data, I fail to reject the hypothesis that school effects are unbiased. Overall, many commonly used VAMs are accurate predictors of student achievement gains.

JEL-codes: I2 I21 I24 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
Note: CH ED LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (68)

Published as David J. Deming, 2014. "Using School Choice Lotteries to Test Measures of School Effectiveness," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(5), pages 406-11, May.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19803.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Using School Choice Lotteries to Test Measures of School Effectiveness (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19803

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19803

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().