Assessing the Potential of Using Value-Added Estimates of Teacher Job Performance for Making High-Stakes Personnel Decisions

Reforming teacher tenure is an idea that appears to be gaining traction with the underlying assumption being 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. Here we explore the potential for using value-added models to estimate performance and inform tenure decisions. We find little evidence of convergence or divergence in teacher effectiveness across teachers as they advance in their careers, but strong evidence that prior year estimates of job performance for individual teachers predict student achievement even when there is a multi-year lag between the two.