Precision and stability of schools’ value-added estimates: evidence for Italian primary schools

Imprecision of school value-added estimates has some important implications, especially for policies that use school value-added estimates to predict future performance of schools based on their past and current performance. This note investigates how the precision and stability of a school’s value-added estimates relates to student characteristics. Using Italian administrative data provided by INVALSI (National Evaluation Committee for Education), we find that the stability of school value-added estimates across cohorts does not depend on students’ previous achievement and socio-economic background. This suggests that transitory changes, such as changes in teacher effectiveness, might be associated with the instability in school value-added estimates.