Few topics cause as much debate and concern in education as teacher quality and effectiveness. Do teachers have a strong impact on a student’s performance? Can we measure this impact? How do we identify effective teachers?
Last month, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper by researchers Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff that addresses these questions. The paper provides a detailed analysis of the effects teachers in large urban school district on both the test scores and long-term outcomes of their students. (Read the executive summary here or the full paper here). Building on the recent trend toward “value-added” measurements (which measures the average gain among students in a teacher’s classroom against the student’s prior test scores), the study included two major findings:
