1 Skills , Productivity and the Evaluation of Teacher Performance

We examine the relationships between observational ratings of teacher performance, principals’ evaluations of teachers’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills and test-score based measures of teachers’ productivity. We find that principals can distinguish between high and low performing teachers, but the overall correlation between principal ratings of teachers and teachers’ valueadded contribution to student achievement is modest. The variation across metrics occurs in part because they are capturing different traits. While past teacher value-added predicts future valueadded, principals’ subjective ratings can provide additional information, particularly when prior value-added measures are based on a single year of teacher performance. ___________________________________ This study is funded under grant R305M040121 from the U.S. Department of Education. We wish to thank Stacey Rutledge, William Ingle, Peter Hinrichs and participants in the NBER summer education workshop for their comments. We are also grateful to Brian Jacob for sharing his computer code to determine conditional probabilities of teacher performance. Abhir Kulkarni, Julia Manzella, John Gibson, William Ingle, Micah Sanders, Cynthia Thompson and Lisa Verdon provided valuable research assistance. Previous versions of the paper circulated under the title “What Makes for a Good Teacher and Who Can Tell?” All remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors.