Measuring Teacher Value Added in DC, 2013-2014 School Year

In this report, we document our approach to estimating a value-added model of teacher effectiveness in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) and eligible DC charter schools participating in Race to the Top (RTT) during the 2013–2014 school year. A value-added model that includes school, teacher, and student data from both DCPS and DC charter schools was used to generate estimates for all DC teachers. The DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education and DCPS agreed to make no substantive changes in how value added was calculated for teachers in the 2013–2014 school year compared with the method of calculation in the previous year. Therefore, only minor changes were made to the value-added model between the 2012–2013 and 2013–2014 school years. In this report, we describe the data used to estimate teacher value added in the 2013–2014 school year and provide the technical details of the statistical methods used to estimate value added in 2013–2014. We include tables of diagnostic information that summarize the population of students and teachers on which the value-added estimates were based, as well as the results from the statistical model used to produce those estimates.