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| New Study: Effective Teachers Make Long Lasting Impact |
| posted by: Alix | January 09, 2012, 07:42 PM |
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Reformers and education advocates for years have touted the key to success for students, regardless of grade level, is whether they have access to an effective teacher. Study after study has shown that with effective teachers, students are not only put in positions to succeed, but can potentially make tremendous gains in closing achievement gaps. Based on this assumption, according to a new study that tracks 2.5 million students over 20 years, elementary and middle school teachers who help raise their students' standardized-test scores seem to have a lasting positive effect on those students' lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates, greater college matriculation and ultimate adult earnings. These results expand on what we've already known in that effective teachers can not only advance students on paper, but in life. The study, conducted by Ivy League economists, examines a larger number of students over a longer period of time with more in-depth data than many earlier studies, allowing for a deeper look at how much the quality of individual teachers matters over the long term, with particular regard to student personal lives. The paper has been presented to colleagues in more than a dozen events over the past year, and is the most comprehensive analysis of the value-added ratings of teachers, which measure the impact individual teachers have on student test scores, amongst other quantifiers. While it is relatively new, education experts assert the study will have a profound effect on implementing the value-added system in states and districts for years to come, a policy metric that was endorsed by AAE members in the 2010 Membership Survey. Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution Eric A. Hanushek explained, "Everybody believes that teacher quality is very, very important. What this paper and other work has shown is that it's probably more important than people think. That the variations or differences between really good and really bad teachers have lifelong impacts on children." The study finds that just one poor teacher can make a huge impact. Replacing a poor teacher with an average, based on value-added, one would raise a single classroom's lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists predict. "If you leave a low value-added teacher in your school for 10 years, rather than replacing him with an average teacher, you are hypothetically talking about $2.5 million in lost income," said Professor Friedman, a study author. Students with top teachers are less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, more likely to enroll in college, and more likely to earn more money as adults, the study also found. The authors argue that school districts should use value-added measures in evaluations, even if this means removing low performers from the classroom. Clearly not only is the study the strongest case for the value-added, but it reinforces the belief that excellent educators make life-long impacts on students. With this fact in mind, scholars argue that in conjunction with a value-added model, our focus as a nation should be to attract, sustain, and support a workforce of teachers capable of producing results for students. What do you think about the study's findings? Comment below.
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