Perhaps you recall the hoopla that surrounded the release in late 2011 of a study by economists Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, in which they claimed that a great teacher would produce a huge increase in lifetime earnings, fewer pregnancies, and other wonderful life outcomes. It was reported on the front page of the New York Times, where one of the authors said that the lesson of the study was that it was best to fire teachers who couldn’t produce big gains sooner rather than later. The study was discussed reverentially on the Newshour and President Obama referenced its conclusion in his 2012 State of the Union address.
The central claim was that the great teacher produced a lifetime gain of $266,000 for a typical classroom.
First out of the box to challenge the study was Bruce Baker of Rutgers. He pointed out that if a class had 26 students, each of them would see an increment of $1,000 per year, or about $20 a week, or less than $5 a day. Maybe. Or maybe not.
Recently he realized that the Chetty study was being used to sell test-based evaluation of teachers, and no one among the policymakers seemed aware of the defects and critiques of the study.
He decided that the study seems to have gotten a special kind of treatment, which he refers to as “Mountain-Out-of-a-Molehill-inator.” Once again, here views the skewing of the results to show that policymakers would be foolish to draw conclusions and apply them to real schools and real teachers.
He concludes:
“What really are the implications of this study for practice – for human resource policy in local public (or private schools)? Well, not much! A study like this can be used to guide simulations of what might theoretically happen if we had 10,000 teachers, and were able to identify, with slightly better than even odds, the “really good” teachers – keep them, and fire the rest (knowing that we have high odds that we are wrongly firing many good teachers… but accepting this fact on the basis that we were at least slightly more likely to be right than wrong in identifying future higher vs. lower value added producers). As I noted on my previous post, this type of big data – this type of small margin-of-difference finding in big data – really isn’t helpful for making determinations about individual teachers in the real world. Yeah… works great in big-data simulations based on big-data findings, but that’s about it.
“Indeed it’s an interesting study, but to suggest that this study has important immediate implications for school and district level human resource management is not only naive, but reckless and irresponsible and must stop.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
typical education policy formulation: hype something that seems to good to be true without question. I am still looking for research on carpe diem schools. So far, nothing but hype. Any real research?
Just looking at the numbers, $266,000 divided by 26 is $10,000 per student over their lifetime. Assuming they work more than 10 years, that average is much smaller than he pointed out… If we take 25 years, which his lowballing it,(40 is more accurate) the average is down to $400 per year or $8 dollars per week, or $1.60 per working day…..
You are firing teachers for $1.60?
No, we are firing teachers because we hold them in disdain. And then we are buying $1.60 worth of fig leaves
Fig Leaves? It will take quite a few days then just to pay for shipping..
The flaws of ‘human capital’ policy…
How does junk like this get quoted by the President of the US? This is ridiculous.
This type of “analysis”, where people attempt to quantify the exact amounts that would be lost or gained based on one’s childhood education experience, is always suspect.
And the mainstream or corporate-owned media seems to accept any of these “studies” as if they were now part of the “established scientific consensus”
They’re not.
I’m also a bit confused by such studies in general. The reason so many of these “STEM-related jobs” pay so well compared to others is because relatively few people have acumen and/or experience with these type of jobs.
There’s nothing inherently more “valuable” about being a software engineer or actuarial analyst; they only pay more than fast food worker or delivery truck driver because there are far fewer people who can do these first jobs instead of the last two.
However, doesn’t their prescription change their prediction? If every student did what their parents and teachers urged them to do—study very hard and achieve excellent grades, particularly in math and science—and there was then a massive increase in high school graduates that were proficient in the STEM areas, wouldn’t that result in a major increase in the supply of qualified young people for these STEM-related jobs?
And if there were a plethora of newly qualified graduates for these STEM jobs, wouldn’t their compensation begin to drop, due to market forces?
In fact, if our young people, again, listened to we “wise elders”—parents, teachers, guidance counselors, extended family—and stopped “waisting their time” by studying such “useless” things as history, literature, theatre, art, music, dance, political science, philosophy, Women’s Studies, Black Studies, film, photography and instead gravitated towards nothing but computer science, physics, biology, statistics, engineering, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and more…how long would it be before the STEM jobs started paying no more than an “assistant manager” at Burger King or “customer service representative” at 1-800-WALMART?
There isn’t anything magical about studying STEM in terms of the job market; employers don’t pay these graduates more out of some notion of respect or admiration for taking such “hard” courses.
It’s entirely about the market; supply and demand and the related pricing mechanism.
One more thing that’s easy to overlook: At the end of the workweek, when all of these now low to middle income STEM graduates come home and look forward to a night of entertainment, on the screen, in a theatre, or elsewhere, are they going to miss the actors, the musicians, the comedians, the dancers, the playwrights, the costume designers and others who would have been creating and performing that evening’s entertainment, but are instead competing with them for the “good and important jobs” that they were told would make them financially secure forever?
Just think how different the world would be if John Lennon, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Oprah Winfrey, Ken Burns, J.K. Rowling, Robin Williams, Will Smith, and so many others opted for a “good stable science, business or math job” instead of the yes, very risky, unstable directions they all chose?
Of course, this small number of jobs in the stem areas is also why they lead the list of “fastest growing” every year.
Actually, we’d all be a lot better off if Oprah remained deeply buried in her “The-conditions-of-your-life-are-solely-your-responsibility” delusions, since they dovetail so perfectly with the neoliberal narrative.
exposure to value added teacher in early years of education certainly increases the human capital value,but prof. Chetty etal ‘s estimations may be having certain limitations,any how thanks for refering an interesting story