Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement
利用德克萨斯州学校项目的独特面板数据，分离学校和教师对学生成绩的影响，发现教师质量对阅读和数学成绩有显著作用，但可观测特征如教育或经验无法解释教师质量的差异。
This paper disentangles the impact of schools and teachers in influencing achievement with special attention given to the potential problems of omitted or mismeasured variables and of student and school selection. Unique matched panel data from the UTD Texas Schools Project permit the identification of teacher quality based on student performance along with the impact of specific, measured components of teachers and schools. Semiparametric lower bound estimates of the variance in teacher quality based entirely on within-school heterogeneity indicate that teachers have powerful effects on reading and mathematics achievement, though little of the variation in teacher quality is explained by observable characteristics such as education or experience. The results suggest that the effects of a costly ten student reduction in class size are smaller than the benefit of moving one standard deviation up the teacher quality distribution, highlighting the importance of teacher effectiveness in the determination of school quality. Copyright The Econometric Society 2005.