Abstract
Value‐added measures of educational progress have been used by education researchers and policy‐makers to assess the performance of teachers and schools, contributing to performance‐related pay and position in school league tables. They are designed to control for all underlying differences between pupils and should therefore provide unbiased measures of school and teacher influence on pupil progress, however, their effectiveness has been questioned. We exploit genetic data from a UK birth cohort to investigate how successfully value‐added measures control for genetic differences between pupils. We use raw value‐added, contextual value‐added (which additionally controls for background characteristics) and teacher‐reported value‐added measures built from data at ages 11, 14 and 16. Sample sizes for analyses range from 4,600 to 6,518. Our findings demonstrate that genetic differences between pupils explain little variation in raw value‐added measures but explain up to 20% of the variation in contextual value‐added measures (95% CI = 6.06% to 35.71%). Value‐added measures built from teacher‐rated ability have a greater proportion of variance explained by genetic differences between pupils, with 36.3% of their cross‐sectional variation being statistically accounted for by genetics (95% CI = 22.8% to 49.8%). By contrast, a far greater proportion of variance is explained by genetic differences for raw test scores at each age of at least 47.3% (95% CI: 35.9 to 58.7). These findings provide evidence that value‐added measures of educational progress can be influenced by genetic differences between pupils, and therefore may provide a biased measure of school and teacher performance. We include a glossary of genetic terms for educational researchers interested in the use of genetic data in educational research.
Highlights
Value-added (VA) measures are frequently used by education researchers and policymakers to assess the performance of teachers and schools, and impact upon performance-related pay, position in school league tables and school accountability (Leckie & Goldstein, 2009; Ray et al, 2009)
We find that the heritability of educational attainment increases from 47% at age 11 to 61% at age 16, suggesting that genetics explains a greater proportion of the variation in outcomes at age 16 than earlier ages
While the raw measures in our sample appear to be largely independent of genetic background and may provide an indication of the contribution that teachers and schools make to a child’s educational progress, our findings demonstrate that contextual measures will provide an unfair reflection of teachers and schools and could unfairly penalise those depending upon the intake that they receive
Summary
Value-added (VA) measures are frequently used by education researchers and policymakers to assess the performance of teachers and schools, and impact upon performance-related pay, position in school league tables and school accountability (Leckie & Goldstein, 2009; Ray et al, 2009). Because VA measures compare a student’s academic performance to their performance at an earlier stage, they are designed to present a measure of progress in performance that controls for betweenindividual time-invariant differences such as a child’s underlying level of ability (McCaffrey et al, 2004). They are considered to provide a reliable measure of educational progress independent of the selection of pupils, background characteristics and innate ability (Chetty et al, 2014a). Despite research demonstrating that children assigned to high-VA teachers outperform children assigned to low-VA teachers (Chetty et al, 2014b), and that VA can correctly identify the most able teachers, there has been criticism of the extent to which they successfully control for time-invariant factors (Taylor & Nguyen, 2006; Gorard et al, 2013)
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