View Research by Author - Michael Hansen

Publications

Race to the Top encourages states to adopt policies that measure the impact of individual teachers on student learning and use those measures to inform human capital decisions including tenure. As a number of states begin to revamp their tenure-granting policies, the idea that high-stakes personnel decisions need to be linked to direct measures of teacher effectiveness is gaining traction among education policymakers. Contributing to the debate over policies that enhance teacher quality, this brief evaluates how well early-career performance signals teacher effectiveness after tenure.

This study presents a generalization to the standard career concerns model and applies it to the public teacher labor market. The model predicts that optimal teacher effort levels decline with both tenure at a school and experience, all things being equal. Using administrative data from North Carolina spanning 14 school years through 2008, the study finds significant changes in teacher sick leave consistent with the generalized career concerns model. There is evidence that observed behaviors cannot be due to the endogeneity of teacher mobility decisions alone as well as evidence suggestive of teacher shirking. In sum, teachers exert considerable discretion over their own effort levels in response to these incentives, with important policy implications.

Reforming teacher tenure is an idea that appears to be gaining traction with the underlying assumption 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. In this paper, the authors explore the potential for using value-added models to estimate performance and inform tenure decisions. There is little evidence that the variation of teacher effects change over teacher careers, but strong evidence that prior year estimates of job performance predict student achievement, even when there is a multi-year lag between the two.

Race to the Top's prescribed models for turning around the nation's lowest-performing schools are designed for urban areas and leave rural districts out of the high-stakes money game. This omission needs to be fixed.

Using individual teacher and student-level longitudinal data from North Carolina, this research brief presents selected findings from work examining the stability of value-added model estimates of teacher effectiveness, focusing on their implication for teacher tenure policies and making high stakes personnel decisions. Findings show year-to-year correlations in teacher effects are modest, but pre-tenure estimates of teacher job performance do predict estimated post-tenure performance in both math and reading, and would therefore seem to be a reasonable metric to use as a factor in making substantive teacher selection decisions.

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