Conventional wisdom says the most important factor in education is money. I’ve long disagreed with that notion. I think two factors are key: the involvement of the parent and the quality and effectiveness of the teacher. In today’s Daily Journal, JLF President John Hood writes about new research that looks at the relationship between teacher quality and student achievement. I suggest you read the whole piece.
Late last year, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper examining the validity of value-added measures as a means of identifying teachers who confer long-term benefits on their students. The three researchers – Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff – were responding to the common objection that teachers who appear to add value in the classroom may only be inheriting students who, for other reasons, were likely to progress regardless of the quality of the instruction they received.
The researchers found no evidence that value-added assessments were biased by socioeconomic status (SES). Such assessments really do seem to measure the value that individual teachers add to the classroom experience. Furthermore, the study showed that students exposed to high-value-added teachers exhibit remarkable benefits.
