Evaluating Teacher Evaluation – Evidence From Chile

Abstract

This study applies a quasi-experimental research design to evaluate the effects of Chile’s national teacher evaluation system on teacher productivity (as measured by student learning), on teaching behaviors, and on teacher beliefs. The paper’s identification strategy exploits a recent change in the evaluation assignment mechanism, together with a discontinuity in the evaluation system’s scoring mechanism. Jointly, these two factors provide plausibly exogenous variation in which teachers get newly evaluated, after two years. My econometric analysis is motivated by, and overcomes, two limitations of a simple regression-discontinuity approach: systematic sorting of teachers close to the cut-off score, as well as additional programs that also use the same cut-off to determine teacher eligibility. The study’s main results suggest that student learning, teacher beliefs, and teaching behaviors remain unaffected by a teacher’s reevaluation, both in the year of the evaluation and in the year thereafter. The article confirms that these findings are not driven by a teacher’s level of work experience, by student sorting, or by systematic attrition.