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Value of Excellent Teachers
January 16, 2012
The foolish person seeks happiness in the distance, the wise person grows it under his feet.
-James Oppenheim
-James Oppenheim
This is the conclusion of a new study, reported in the New York Times (January 6, 2012), which tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years. Here are some excerpts from the New York Times story:
"The average effect of one teacher on a single student is modest. All else equal, a student with one excellent teacher for one year between fourth and eighth grade would gain $4,600 in lifetime income, compared to a student of similar demographics who has an average teacher. The student with the excellent teacher would also be 0.5 percent more likely to attend college....
"In the aggregate, these differences are potentially enormous. Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate. Multiply that by a career’s worth of classrooms...
"The new study found no evidence for one piece of conventional wisdom: that having a good teacher in an early grade has a bigger effect than having a good teacher in later grades."
You Can't Say You Can't Play
In this book, Vivian Paley employs a unique strategy to probe the moral dimensions of the classroom. She departs from her previous work by extending her analysis to children through the fifth grade, all the while weaving remarkable fairy tale into her narrative description. Paley introduces a new rule-"You can't say you can't play"-to her kindergarten classroom and solicits the opinions of older children regarding the fairness of such a rule. We hear from those who are rejected as well as those who do the rejecting. One child, objecting to the rule, says, "It will be fairer, but how are we going to have any fun?" Another child defends the principle of classroom bosses as a more benign way of excluding the unwanted.Learn More and Purchase!
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Comments (2)
Displaying All 2 CommentsDurham, NC, United States
I find it astounding that, on a day when we're celebrating the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., we are sent an article that puts a dollar value on excellent teaching. Isn't that the same mindset that evaluates teaching by end-of-grade test scores?
It seems to me that this is a day when we should dream a little about how effective teaching can help children discover their passions in life and find a way to follow those passions to give back to the world the gifts they've been given. It's a day for dreaming a little about how effective teachers can help children know that what they think and say and do matters ~ that it matters a lot. It's a day for effective parents and caretakers to tell children that they are loved from the top of their heads to the tips of their toes and that we have so much to learn from them as they begin to change the world we have created. Those sorts of lessons are ~ invaluable!
Sheryl Scrimsher, Preschool Teacher
Wheelock College
Lincoln, MA, United States
Strange wording. I'm not sure that "conventional wisdom" would disagree with the value-added data, but longitudinal research tells us that an early childhood experience prior to primary education has a strong effect on positive outcomes.
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