TRUTH

Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that good teachers are worth their weight in gold. The research draws from a substantial data-set from a large unnamed urban American school district covering 20 years of results and more than 2.5 million pupils.

Key findings include:

• The quality of teachers varies much more within schools than among them: a typical school has teachers spanning 85% of the spectrum for the school system as a whole. Not only do teachers matter, in other words, but the best teachers are not generally clumped within particular schools.
• Across schools, however, better pupils are assigned to slightly better teachers on average. The common practice of “tracking” pupils (filtering good ones into more advanced courses) could be to blame, the authors reckon, though they abstain from drawing firm conclusions. Whatever the cause, getting more effective teachers to instruct better-performing pupils naturally exacerbates the gap in achievement.
• Exposure to better teachers is associated with an increased probability of attending university and, among pupils who go on to university, with attendance at better ones, as well as with higher earnings. Somewhat more unexpectedly, good teachers also seem to reduce odds of teenage pregnancy and raise participation in retirement-savings plans. Effects seem to be stronger for girls than for boys, and English teachers have a longer-lasting influence on their pupils’ futures than math teachers.
• Pay peanuts, create monkeys. Given the stakes, the salary rises needed to coax teachers into accepting rigorous assessment and performance-linked pay seem a bargain. Though not easy, school reforms that identify good teachers and assign them to struggling pupils should pay off handsomely. Making the best teachers work with the worst pupils could go a long way toward minimizing the large differences in student attainment within a school system, the authors contend.

Click HERE for an article about the research by the Economist.