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Abstract

The success of students with disabilities (SWDs) depends on access to high-quality general education teachers. Yet, teacher value-added measures (VAMs) generally fail to distinguish between effectiveness in educating students with or without disabilities. Using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District, we create two VAMs: one focusing on teachers’ effectiveness for SWDs and one for non-SWDs. We find that many top-performing teachers for non-SWDs have relatively lower VAMs for SWDs and vice versa, and that on average SWDs have teachers with lower scores in both VAMs than non-SWDs. Overall, SWD-specific VAMs may be more suitable for identifying which teachers have a history of effectiveness with SWDs and could play a role in informing student assignment to teachers.

Keywords

value-added estimation students with disabilities teacher effectiveness equity teacher evaluation

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