A recent study authored by Will Dobbie of Harvard University suggests that teacher success can be predicted at the time of hire. For his study, Dobbie looked at Teach For America’s (TFA) admissions measures to see if they can predict teachers’ future impact on student achievement.
TFA bases their selection of candidates on several criteria believed to be linked to success in the classroom. These criteria include achievement, leadership experience, perseverance, critical thinking, organizational ability, motivational ability, respect for others, and commitment to the TFA mission. Dobbie linked selection data to administrative data on student outcomes in New York City to see if the TFA selection criteria predict student achievement.
Dobbie found that the TFA measures of achievement, leadership, and perseverance are associated with student gains in math in a teacher’s first year. In English, it appears that leadership and dedication to the TFA mission are related to student gains, but Dobbie admits that the imprecision of the estimates used make definitive conclusions difficult in this area. Critical thinking, organization and motivational abilities and respect for others do not appear to be “significantly related to achievement in either subject, though we can not rule out modest impacts.” The TFA measures also are marginally associated with fewer behavioral infractions.
Dobbie concludes that these findings have “enormous implications for school districts.” Rather than using an ex-post strategy of retaining the top 20 percent of new teachers based on a value-added model, this paper suggests that a strategy of ex-ante screening using TFA admissions measures would have a larger impact on achievement and be more practical. This would also be a far less expensive method than other non-teacher based interventions, such as reduced class sizes and developing charter schools.
To read the full study, please visit http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/teachercharacteristicsjuly2011.pdf
