Incentives And Behavior In DC’s Teacher Evaluation System
A new working paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is the first high quality assessment of one of the new teacher evaluation systems sweeping across the nation. The study, by Thomas Dee and James Wyckoff, both highly respected economists, focuses on the first three years of IMPACT, the evaluation system put into place in the District of Columbia Public Schools in 2009.
Under IMPACT, each teacher receives a point total based on a combination of test-based and non-test-based measures (the formula varies between teachers who are and are not in tested grades/subjects). These point totals are then sorted into one of four categories – highly effective, effective, minimally effective and ineffective. Teachers who receive a highly effective (HE) rating are eligible for salary increases, whereas teachers rated ineffective are dismissed immediately and those receiving minimally effective (ME) for two consecutive years can also be terminated. The design of this study exploits that incentive structure by, put very simply, comparing the teachers who were directly above the ME and HE thresholds to those who were directly below them, and to see whether they differed in terms of retention and performance from those who were not. The basic idea is that these teachers are all very similar in terms of their measured performance, so any differences in outcomes can be (cautiously) attributed to the system’s incentives.
The short answer is that there were meaningful differences.
Teachers with scores just below the ME cutoff were substantially more likely to quit, while those that remained exhibited modest but meaningful relative performance gains the following year (equivalent to about five percentile points). Similarly, teachers who earned an HE rating, and were therefore eligible for a large, permanent salary
