Volume 25, Number 2 (Spring) 1990
Hanushek, Eric A. and Lori Taylor. 1990. "Alternative Assessment of the Performance of Schools: Measurement of State Variations in Achievement." Journal of Human Resources 25(2):179-201.
Evaluation of the efficacy of school policies requires measures of student performance across schools and states, but conventional approaches to constructing the relevant data can be very misleading. This paper develops an approach to estimating marginal school effects at the state level. It then documents and estimates the magnitude of biases introduced by commonly employed estimators of school quality. Direct estimates of achievement growth, or value-added, are shown to be far superior to any alternative correction that is commonly employed. Especially at the state level, nonrepresentative data such as aggregate SAT scores provide very biased measures of school quality differences - even when statistical adjustments for demographic differences and varying participation rates are employed.
Eric A. Hanushek is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester. Lori L. Taylor is a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. This is a substantially modified version of a paper originally presented at the 1987 AAPAM Research Conference in Washington, DC. The authors are grateful for helpful comments by Marcus Berliant, Charles Phelps, and anonymous referees.
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