Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in the Classroom

Abstract

Do teachers’ expectations directly impact student achievement? We draw on administrative data from North Carolina schools that report both student test scores and teachers’ expectations of students’ performance on these tests. Employing student fixed effects and instrumental variables strategies to overcome endogeneity concerns, we find that higher exogenously determined teacher expectations increase test scores for fourth to eighth graders. Impacts are suggestively larger for students in earlier grades and in self-contained classes with the same math and reading teacher.