Taking Teacher Evaluation to Scale: The Effect of State Reforms on Achievement and Attainment

Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to undertake major efforts to reform teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting their staggered implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on average, that rule out impacts as small as 0.017 standard deviations for achievement and 1.2 percentage points for high school graduation and college enrollment. We highlight five factors that likely limited the efficacy of evaluation reforms at scale: political opposition, decentralization, capacity constraints, limited generalizability, and the absence of compensating wages.