Do Teacher Credentials and Characteristics Affect Teacher Effectiveness in High School Economics?

Abstract

We use student-level administrative data from Georgia to examine how teacher characteristics affect student learning. Specifically, we examine students’ normalized end-of-course test scores for a required high school economics course. We develop two models. First, we examine returns to activities often linked to teacher effectiveness—experience, advanced degrees, National Board Certification, and curriculum-specific in-service workshops. Second, we investigate the importance of having teachers share characteristics with their students. Similar to many studies before us, we find little systematic link between any of the observable teacher characteristics and better student outcomes once we control for unobservable teacher characteristics. Of note, we do find that female students tend to perform better with female teachers than with male teachers. Overall, the results highlight the difficulty in relying on just one specific measure of teacher quality to ensure student performance. JEL Classifications: A13, A21, I24