Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A growing body of evidence in education suggests teachers’ efficacy in improving students’ skills grows persistently as they gain more experience (e.g., Ladd & Sorensen 2011; Wiswall 2013). However, a variety of policy changes in education have focused on accountability tied to both individual- and school-level performance measures, and evidence suggests both teachers and schools respond to these incentives by focusing on particular subgroups of students (e.g., Reback 2008; Figlio 2005). Both the evidence on the performance returns associated with teacher experience and the performance measures used to incentivize teacher performance in many accountability policies rely on a teacher’s influence on the growth rate of an average student.

Such averages mask the distributional effects of teachers and less is known about how teachers differentially affect the growth of students who enter their classrooms at different levels of ability. On the one hand, increasing returns to teacher experience may be driven by teachers learning how to better improve the abilities of poor performing students, leading to decreasing educational inequality with teacher experience. On the other hand, teachers may learn to identify and improve the performance of their top students over time, increasing both their average growth rate and the skills gap between their top and bottom students in the process.

We will investigate the distributional effects of teacher experience using administrative data from North Carolina and teacher-specific value-added models.