Value of Excellent Teachers

"Elementary and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings."  

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."

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