Examining Teacher Quality Gaps in the Philadelphia School District

This paper compares the presence of teacher quality gaps (TQGs) in charter schools to those present in traditional public schools (TPS) within the Philadelphia School District. No significant difference in TQGs was found to exist when student disadvantage was defined by socioeconomic status and teacher quality was defined by years of experience, but there was a significant difference favoring traditional public schools when student disadvantage was defined as identification with an underrepresented minority group (URM). An examination of the value-added score distributions of charter and traditional public schools found TPS to have higher minimum, median and maximum scores than charter schools. Despite these differences in distribution, the use of these scores to quantify TQGs according to both socioeconomic and URM status of students failed to show a significant difference except for when math value-added scores were the measure of teacher quality and student disadvantage was determined by socioeconomic status.

Author dc:creator

• Heard, Cecilia

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jose Miguel Abito

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/49219

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/49219