The effect of school spending on student achievement: addressing biases in value-added models

摘要

The estimation of education production models used to evaluate the effect of school inputs and past skills on test scores, often called value-added models, can be biased by three main econometric issues: unobserved child characteristics, unobserved family and school characteristics and measurement error. We propose a two-step estimation technique which exploits the availability of test scores across time, subjects, families and schools in a unique administrative dataset for England to correct for these potential biases. Our empirical results suggest that omitting school characteristics biases the esti