Having said that, I do agree with the premise that great teachers have a tremendous effect on ‘some’ students. Typically great parents have the greatest effect and while in the past almost all children went to public schools, today I see many of the best parents homeschooling their children.

Perhaps the suburban districts tend to have a more experienced teacher workforce. I know my district tends to hire experienced teachers, because they have more applicants than openings. The experienced, reliable teachers are not evenly distributed. That doesn’t mean that one can produce an education system in which all teachers have more than 10 years of experience.

One way around it would be to encourage team-teaching, in which a younger teacher and a veteran teacher would teach the equivalent of 2 classes.

There is also the question I’m surprised no one has posed. If a stellar teacher were to increase later earnings, does a very bad teacher decrease earnings?

I think you’ve made a few critical mistakes on this one.

1) You trusted the reporter to get the findings of a complicated academic paper right. I don’t have access to the original paper, and I have not spoken to the researchers myself, but the pieces makes claims tht are unsupported by the powerpoint summary that the article links to.

2) You didn’t notice that they are projecting lifetime earnings for people who were in kindergarten in the 1980′s. If the increase in scores that the Star study found did not persist over time, why should be presume that that increase in early lifetime earning persists over time? I would think that particularly with THIS data set that researchers ought to be very careful with projecting future outcomes based only on early outcomes.

3) There is no explaination of how teacher quality was measured. Rather, the slides admit that it is impossible to separate peer effects from teacher quality in kindergarten, given their data. Heck, they can’t even show kindergarten growth, so we don’t know how much gain to split up among different potential contributors, anyway.

Any time someone talks or writes about teacher quality, we should ask them how they are measuring it, and how they re disentangling it from all the other factors.

Really? Names? Or is this reflexive opposition to standard economic analysis?

(Joanne): “The Harvard researchers ‘estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year,’ based on ‘the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers’, Leonhardt writes.”

Since homeschooled kids stomp conventionally schooled kids on usual measures of academic performance, I wonder what a homeschooling mom is worth. $320,000 = 20 x $16,000. Looks like we should pay homeschooling moms $16,000 per child per year, and that’s not taking into account the reduced exposure to legal liability that homeschoolers provide to taxpayers.

See the account I summarized on Kitchen Table Math of a landmark study published in Harvard Educational Review:

http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2008/02/miss-and-moneyball.html

Better yet, get a copy of the paper (unfortunately, it is not online anywhere, but the data are very comprehensive). I got my district’s professional library staff to get me a copy through interlibrary loan.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/07/26/37yalow.h29.html

Yes we know kids must have strong elementary teachers (academically strong elementary teachers) to be successful in middle and high school…if this is true about the kindergarten teachers what does it mean about the caliber of teachers in pre-school and head start programs…shouldn’t they be degreed too? Interesting…time to raise the caliber of elementary teachers the most critical link in the chain and today one of the weakest…

It will be interesting to see what comes of this information