TY  - RPRT
TI  - Classroom Composition Affects Teacher Performance Ratings
AU  - Delgado, William
AU  - Sartain, Lauren
PY  - 2026
T3  - EdWorkingPaper
M1  - 26-1395
PB  - Annenberg Institute at Brown University
DO  - 10.26300/2c7t-mt76
UR  - https://edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1395
AB  - Teacher evaluations should reflect teaching performance rather than the characteristics of the students assigned to a teacher. Exploiting naturally occurring year-to-year variation in classroom composition within teachers, this paper examines whether teacher performance ratings assigned by evaluators and students are influenced by classroom context. We find that teachers with higher-achieving and less disruptive students, holding constant the teacher and school, receive systematically higher performance ratings. These effects are robust across model specifications, placebo tests, and multiple dimensions of teaching practice. By contrast, classroom demographics show no consistent association with performance ratings. A policy that adjusts evaluator scores for classroom characteristics, analogous to value-added models, increases the relative ranking of Black teachers by 8 percentage points, highlighting equity impacts of considering classroom context.
ER  -