Essays on the Effects of Teacher Grading Standards and Other Teaching Practices

Chapter One explores whether teacher grading standards affect learning. Lenient standards are controversial because of concerns that students may put less effort into a course. Conversely, harder standards may discourage the lower performing students. Using detailed longitudinal data on all North Carolina public school students and teachers over 10 academic school years, I find that harder standards increase student achievement in math but not in English and Language Arts. Contrary to popular belief and standard models of student optimizing behavior, harder standards do not leave the lower performing students behind---students of all abilities benefit similarly from harder standards. Altogether, I find that students assigned to a more lenient teacher earn higher course grades, report spending less time on homework, yet learn no more than students assigned to a harder teacher. Using the same data as Chapter One, Chapter Two explores whether differences in grading standards among teachers in middle school have long-term effects on high school through the student's course selection, achievement or college major interests. Differences in grading standards among teachers make grades less informative, may unfairly reward or penalize students when grades are used in high-stakes decisions, like class assignment, and may distort a student's perception of their own ability. I do not find consistent evidence that students benefit from lenient standards in the future, or become more interested in related subjects/majors, even though students do end up earning higher course grades as a result of lenient standards. Chapter Three studies how the effectiveness of teachers varies by classroom composition, combining random assignment of teachers with rich measures of teaching practices based on a popular teacher-evaluation protocol. We find that some teaching practices are more effective in raising math achievement in classrooms with higher average prior achievement, and others are more effective in classrooms with less heterogeneity in prior achievement. We use these estimates to simulate the effects of reallocating classrooms among teachers within schools. We find substantial differences between counterfactual and actual teacher effectiveness rankings, supporting the importance of classroom composition for evaluating teachers and prescribing practice.Doctor of Philosoph

Teacher effectiveness and classroom composition

This paper studies how the effectiveness of teachers varies by classroom composition. We combine random assignment of teachers to classrooms with rich measures of teacher effectiveness based on a popular observational protocol, Framework for Teaching, to overcome key endogeneity concerns related to measurement and matching. We find that complementarities between classroom composition and teaching practice play a significant role in student achievement. We identify two main mechanisms that are driving this result: 1) negative interactions between challenging and/or student-centered practices and heterogeneity in classroom prior achievement, and 2) positive interactions between classroom management skills and average classroom prior achievement. Our findings illustrate the multidimensional nature of teacher effectiveness and have important implications for prescribing teaching practice and evaluating teachers. Simulations show that teacher rankings change substantially simply from within-school classroom reallocations, suggesting the need for caution when using popular teaching evaluation rubrics in high-stakes settings