What Can Different Measures Tell Us About the Quality of the Teacher Workforce?

This CALDER research brief builds on pioneering research by the Measures of Effective Teaching Project (Kane et al., 2013) and Jackson (2018) to look at two measures of teacher quality--value-added measures (VAMs) for both test outcomes and non-test outcomes--and what they can tell education leaders about the teacher workforce. Both measures use a value-added framework to separate out a teacher’s contributions to student outcomes from other factors, like a student’s previous academic record or economic circumstances. By trying to isolate teacher contributions to student outcomes, the measures speak to the question, would students be better off with a different teacher?