Beyond the Test: New Estimates of Long-Term Teacher Effectiveness

Elizabeth Ulrich Cascio

Reform of elementary and secondary education in the United States today rests heavily on the notion that teachers leave a lasting mark on their students. But do teachers have persistent impacts? Existing research on this question has focused exclusively on the effects of teachers on student test scores several years later. While findings from this research suggest that the effects of teachers “fade out,” test performance measures knowledge imperfectly and may not at all reflect the “non-cognitive” skills – like motivation – that may be critical for well-being later in life. This project will help to fill this gap in our knowledge by estimating the effects of elementary school teachers on a truly long-term outcome – college attendance – using both experimental and observational data and tools already developed for estimating teacher effects on test scores. To the extent that there is such a finding, a supplemental analysis of great practical importance will illuminate which attributes observed today have the capacity to identify teachers with a lasting impact.

About Elizabeth Ulrich Cascio

Elizabeth Cascio is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. Cascio’s fields are labor economics and public economics, and her primary research interest is in the economics of education. Her research to date has focused on the resource allocation decisions and output of schools, with an emphasis on the consequences of state and federal interventions in the 1960s and 1970s. This work includes studies on the effects of state subsidization of kindergarten programs on children’s long-term outcomes and maternal labor supply, on the test-score impacts of state regulations on school entry, and on how federal civil rights legislation affected the racial composition of schools, school district finances, and student outcomes. Cascio is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). Before joining the faculty of Dartmouth College in 2006, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003.