The effect of Teach for America on the distribution of student achievement in primary school: Evidence from a randomized experiment

•We examine the effect of Teach for America on the distribution of student achievement in primary school.•We use a randomized experiment and fixed effect quantile regression (FEQR).•We find TFA teachers generally neither help nor hurt students in terms of reading test scores.•We find TFA teachers help students in terms of math test scores across the entire math achievement distribution.•We find that there is significant heterogeneity in the effects of TFA for several of the subgroups under consideration.

Using data from a randomized experiment and fixed effect quantile regression (FEQR), we examine the effects of having a TFA teacher on test scores across the entire achievement distribution of primary school students in disadvantaged neighborhoods. While we generally find that TFA teachers neither help nor hurt students in terms of reading test scores, we find positive and statistically significant effects of TFA across the math achievement distribution for the full sample and the effects are fairly uniform. We find a similar distributional effect of TFA within student gender, although the FEQR estimates for female students are two to three times larger than for male students. We also find that there is evidence of heterogeneity in the effects of TFA for Hispanic and black students and for students taught by novice teachers. Finally, we find that the effect of TFA is homogeneous across the math achievement distribution irrespective of certification type.