Teacher training, teacher quality and student achievement

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Abstract

We study the effects of various types of education and training on the productivity of teachers in promoting student achievement. Previous studies on the subject have been hampered by inadequate measures of teacher training and difficulties in addressing the non-random selection of teachers to students and of teachers to training. We address these issues by estimating models that include detailed measures of pre-service and in-service training, a rich set of time-varying covariates, and student, teacher, and school fixed effects. We find that elementary and middle school teacher productivity increases with experience (informal on-the-job training). The largest gains from experience occur in the first few years, but we find continuing gains beyond the first five years of a teacher's career. In contrast, we do not find a consistent relationship between formal professional development training and teacher productivity. However, this may be partly driven by estimation issues as we find more significant positive effects of formal training in the subject-grade combination where estimates should be most precise (middle school math). There is no evidence that teachers' pre-service (undergraduate) training or college entrance exam scores are related to productivity.

Research Highlights

► Elementary and middle school teacher productivity increases with experience. ► Inconsistent relationship between professional development and teacher productivity. ► Teachers' pre-service training and exam scores are unrelated to productivity.

Introduction

It is generally acknowledged that promoting teacher quality is a key element in improving primary and secondary education in the United States. Indeed, one of the main goals of recent presidential administrations has been to have a “highly qualified teacher” in every classroom. While recent research has documented the central role of teacher quality in promoting student achievement, there is no consensus on what factors enhance, or even signal, teacher quality. This has fueled debate over how best to prepare new teachers and how to improve the quality of the existing teacher labor force. To better understand the determinants of teacher quality, we consider the relationship between teacher productivity and teacher training, including formal pre-service university education, in-service professional development, and informal training acquired through on-the-job experience.

Uncertainty regarding the effects of teacher training is due in large measure to three methodological challenges in estimating the effects of training on teacher quality. First, it is difficult to isolate productivity, especially in teaching where a student's own ability, the influences of a student's peers, and other characteristics of schools also affect measured outcomes. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that assignment of students and teachers to classrooms is usually not random, leading to possible correlations between observed teacher attributes and unobserved student characteristics. Second, as in other occupations, there is an inherent selection problem in evaluating the effects of education and training on teacher productivity. Unobserved teacher characteristics, such as motivation or intelligence, may affect the amount and types of education and training they choose to obtain as well as subsequent performance of teachers in the classroom. Third, it is difficult to obtain data that provide much detail about the various types of training teachers receive and even more difficult to link the training of teachers to the achievement of the students they teach. Addressing all of these issues in a single study presents significant data and estimation challenges.

In this paper we address these challenges and present new evidence on the effects of human capital obtained before entering the teaching profession (pre-service education) and after entry. The latter includes in-service professional development, advanced degrees, and informal training acquired through experience. We utilize a rich statewide administrative database from Florida that allows us to tie student performance to the identity of their classroom teacher at all grade levels and in turn link teachers to their in-service training, their college coursework and majors, and their pre-college entrance exam scores. These data provide an opportunity to analyze the effects of both pre-service and in-service training on teacher productivity while addressing the twin selection problems associated with teacher acquisition of training and assignment of students to teachers.

Our analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we estimate student achievement models that include a substantial set of covariates that measure the time-varying observable characteristics of individual students, their classroom peers, and their school's principal. We also incorporate multiple levels of fixed effects that control for unmeasured time-invariant student, teacher and school characteristics. This first-stage model includes detailed information on the quantity and characteristics of education and training teachers receive after they have entered the classroom, including both formal graduate education and professional development courses sponsored by schools and school districts. We also include measures of teacher experience, which represent informal on-the-job training. This first step yields estimates of the fixed effect for each teacher, which represents the teacher's contribution to student achievement or “value added” that does not vary over her career. In the second step we take the estimated teacher fixed effect and regress it on characteristics of teachers' (time-invariant) undergraduate coursework, controlling for teacher pre-college cognitive/verbal ability with college entrance exam scores.

We begin in Section 2 by describing past literature on teacher training. Our data and methodology are discussed in 3 Data, 4 Econometric model and estimation strategies, respectively. Our results, presented in Section 5, suggest that only two of the forms of teacher training influence productivity; content-focused teacher professional development is positively associated with productivity in middle and high school math and on-the-job training acquired through experience is correlated with enhanced effectiveness in teaching both math and reading in elementary and middle schools. The implications of our findings are discussed in Section 6.

Section snippets

Previous literature on the effects of teacher training

In early work on teacher productivity, researchers estimated education production functions by regressing aggregate student achievement levels on measures of teacher training and various other controls using cross-sectional data (see review by Hanushek (1986)). A subsequent generation of studies used student-level two-year test-score gains and richer sets of teacher training variables to evaluate the impact of teacher training on student achievement. The state of the literature through the year

Data

To study the effects of teacher training we make use of an extensive panel data set of school administrative records from Florida.4 The data cover all public school students throughout the state and include student-level achievement test data for both math and reading in each of grades 3–10 for the years 1999–2000 through 2004–2005.5

Measuring teacher productivity and within-career education and training

While the issue of measuring a teacher's output is controversial, particularly outside the economics literature, we shall simply define the relevant product as student achievement measured by standardized tests. Consequently, we view a teacher's productivity as their contribution to student achievement, holding other inputs constant. To empirically measure the impact of education and training on teacher productivity it is therefore necessary to first develop a model of student achievement.

Effects of experience and professional development training

Initial estimates of the student achievement model, including student, teacher and school fixed effects, are presented in Table 3.28

Summary and conclusions

Our study differs in several important ways from other recent contributions to the rapidly expanding literature on teacher training. First, ours is the first multi-district study to simultaneously control for unobserved student, teacher and school heterogeneity through the use of multiple levels of fixed effects. Coupled with tests for dynamic student–teacher sorting, we argue this approach significantly attenuates selection biases due to non-random assignment of students to teachers and

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the staff of the Florida Department of Education's K-20 Education Data Warehouse and the Bureau of Educator Recruitment, Development and Retention for their assistance in obtaining and interpreting the data used in this study. The views expressed is this paper are solely our own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Florida Department of Education. Valuable research assistance was provided by Li Feng, John Gibson, Micah Sanders and Cynthia Thompson. This research

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