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Teachers matter

the New York Times:

Skeptics have often expressed doubt that good teachers would make any difference in the lives of the country’s poorest students, who typically show up in first grade not at all prepared to learn. The Education Trust study, which draws on a treasure-trove of data from several states, clearly refutes this notion. The most important data set comes from Illinois, where researchers scrutinized the work and qualifications of 140,000 teachers, all of whom were assigned quality ratings based on several indicators, including where they attended college and how much experience they had.

The Illinois study found teacher quality mattered a great deal in high-poverty high schools, where students with highly rated teachers were about twice as likely to meet state standards as similarly situated students elsewhere. Teacher quality even trumped course content, and it did not take paragons of achievement to make the difference. For example, students who took Algebra II at schools with average teacher quality ratings turned out to be better prepared for college than students who had completed calculus at schools with low teacher ratings.

Taken together, the multistate data cited in the study show that teacher experience makes a profound difference in student performance, as do teacher literacy levels. The facts are especially clear when it comes to the crucial areas of math and science, where teachers who have majored in the subject areas generate better student performance than those who majored in outside areas.

Those who try to downplay teacher quality seem to make a sort of chicken-and-egg argument: fix the outside social problems like poverty (which, of course, can only be remedied by increased spending), and student performance will improve.  But studies like this point out that the chicken and egg are reversed: fix teacher quality and student performance will improve–which will, over time, help remedy the social ills of poverty.  In any event, we’re certain Ken De Rosa will be shocked, shocked at this. 

(Hat tip to Randy Shain at True Schools, who is back from vacation and blogging hard.)