Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood

Are teachers ’ impacts on students ’ test scores (“value-added”) a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate partly be-cause of a lack of evidence on whether high value-added (VA) teach-ers improve students ’ long-term outcomes. Using school district and tax records for more than one million children, we find that students as-signed to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, and are less likely to have children as teenagers. Replacing a teacher whose VA is in the bottom 5 % with an average teacher would increase the present value of students ’ lifetime income by approximately $250,000 per classroom. How can we measure and improve the quality of teaching in primary schools? One prominent but controversial method is to evaluate teachers based on their impacts on students ’ test scores, commonly termed the “value-added ” (VA) approach.1 School districts from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles have begun to calculate VA measures and use them to evaluate teachers. Advocates argue that selecting teachers on the basis o