Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper studies the relationship between pre-college academic achievement and long run teacher performance. We use historical data on college entrance exams from 1967 onward together with administrative records on the population of teachers in Chile to document a robust positive relationship between teachers' own academic achievement and a variety of measures of long-run teacher productivity. Prediction models using only pre-college academic achievement are shown to identify a significant portion of low performing teachers. These findings suggest that the combination of better data and prediction methods can potentially be used to screen out candidates who are the most likely to be ineffective teachers.