The impact of good teachers.

okedoke

There was an interesting article in the Economist this week, http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/education

reporting on the impact on students of exposure to good teachers. The study used a very large sample (2.5m students). Among the findings was ...

"... that swapping a teacher at the bottom of the value-added spectrum with one of average quality raises the collective lifetime income of each class they teach by $1.4m. That rise would apply across all the teacher’s classes and over the whole of his or her career."

Factors other than teacher quality (parental background, income, student ability etc. were controlled for.

This suggests to me that good teachers should be paid far more than they currently are and that allowing poor quality teachers to remain teaching is enormously damaging to the prospects of their students.

Also interesting I thought was that English teachers had a greater impact on students than Maths teachers, which reflects my own anecdotal experience that people often talk about inspirational English/History teachers but rarely about Maths teachers.

Mardy Bum

The previous maths syllabus didn't really leave a whole lot of space for inspirational moments and the new one probably doesn't either.

I remember reading a quote that Dylan Moran, Tommy Tiernan and Hector all had the same English teacher in Navan and a few other well known musicians who was supposedly excellent.

evolving_doors

Mardy Bum wrote: »

The previous maths syllabus didn't really leave a whole lot of space for inspirational moments and the new one probably doesn't either.

I remember reading a quote that Dylan Moran, Tommy Tiernan and Hector all had the same English teacher in Navan and a few other well known musicians who was supposedly excellent.

Well, generally speaking the english teacher learns more from students due to personal essays and giving personal opinions/discussions during class.. Is it incumbent on maths teachers to be doing this?

As regards the study in the Economist...to measure someones wages and correlate it with good teaching in primary school must be a pretty long study (20 years!).
Also, To say that any influencing variables (and other ones we dont know about) have been factored out over such a long space of time is just bonkers

ytareh

Figure quoted is rubbish .If ONE student works for 40 years and earns 30k a year extra as a result of an inspirational teacher they alone have earned 1.2 million extra .The increased earnings per class would be in the tens of millions and taking all the teacher's classes over a 40 year teaching career (yes I know its 50 years for all the new poor unfortunates !) might put you in the 5 BILLION ballpark.How much does a teacher start on again, 27k?(IF they can get a full time job -and of course more than one teacher 'influences' a student -anyway all this is mathematical whimsy -the idea of HOW teachers' performance is gauged is blood chilling .The word 'underperforming' is bandied about willy nilly of late .Too many unscrupulous principals and inspectors who couldnt hack it in the classroom....

okedoke

Armelodie wrote: »

As regards the study in the Economist...to measure someones wages and correlate it with good teaching in primary school must be a pretty long study (20 years!).
Also, To say that any influencing variables (and other ones we dont know about) have been factored out over such a long space of time is just bonkers

- The study uses data spanning 20 years.

- The entire field of econometrics is devoted to doing exactly that - isolating the causal relationship between variables (in this case teacher quality and student outcomes) while holding other factors constant.

okedoke

ytareh wrote: »

Figure quoted is rubbish .If ONE student works for 40 years and earns 30k a year extra as a result of an inspirational teacher they alone have earned 1.2 million extra .The increased earnings per class would be in the tens of millions and taking all the teacher's classes over a 40 year teaching career (yes I know its 50 years for all the new poor unfortunates !) might put you in the 5 BILLION ballpark.How much does a teacher start on again, 27k?(IF they can get a full time job -and of course more than one teacher 'influences' a student -anyway all this is mathematical whimsy -the idea of HOW teachers' performance is gauged is blood chilling .The word 'underperforming' is bandied about willy nilly of late .Too many unscrupulous principals and inspectors who couldnt hack it in the classroom....

Where are you getting a figure of €30K extra per year per student? This is only the additional earnings attributable to the good teacher, not any other factors. The researchers are using actual data not just guessing. I think we may be making the same point though - good teachers are incredibly valuable and devising an system to retain good teachers and attract more talented people into the system could pay unimaginable dividends.

evolving_doors

okedoke wrote: »

- The study uses data spanning 20 years.

- The entire field of econometrics is devoted to doing exactly that - isolating the causal relationship between variables (in this case teacher quality and student outcomes) while holding other factors constant.

20 years is a heck of a long time in someones life, i can;t really see how you would "hold other factors constant" and say that a higher wage is attributable to 1 or 2 good primary school teachers. How did they measure teacher "quality", seems a bit nebulous to me.

Is there any way of actually getting the complete article. Is this published in a peer reviewed journal?

okedoke

All economic research (and research in many other fields) depends on having statistical tools that can hold other factors constant - if these tools didn't exist it would be impossible to test claims of causality in virtually any field (outside of very simple experiments where very variable can be controlled).

They measure quality as "value added" as the ability of a teacher to increase their students' test scores, while controlling for other variables.

Papers (there are 2) linked here:
http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/w19423.pdf
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/jfriedm/value_added2.pdf

Rightwing

Seems to me it's the teachers from other countries is what we should be concerned about.

Our youth are emigrating, and youth from diff countries are arriving.

draiochtanois

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okedoke

draiochtanois wrote: »

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But the economic and developmental pay-off to having great teachers suggests we should make it a more attractive career to divert talented people, who may not currently consider teaching, to enter the profession.

draiochtanois

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okedoke

draiochtanois wrote: »

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I think you need to do both.

jimmytwotimes 2013

we all want to see good teachers in our education system, and a good one can inspire. however, the old chestnut of teacher evaluation then arises. how can we precisely evaluate a teacher's work? given there are so many contributing factors to educational performance, is it even possible?