Teachers and the Gender Gap in Reading Achievement

Abstract

Boys persistently lag behind girls in English/language arts. We find that heterogeneity in teachers’ relative boy-specific value added could explain a large proportion of this gap. We exploit multifaceted measures of effective teaching, including popular teacher observation protocols, principal ratings, and student perceptions of teaching practices, to explain this heterogeneity. We find no evidence of heterogeneous effects of these teacher measures by gender. Instead, we show that gender gaps in student evaluations of teaching practices capture meaningful differences in the perceived inputs boys and girls receive from the same teacher, explaining from a third to all of the value-added gender gap.