A teacher in Nevada sent me this article, which was printed in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
He said he would have laughed at how clueless this Harvard professor was but for the fact that the local opinion makers no doubt would read it and take it seriously.
I started reading it and the first statement was that “The most important determinant of educational quality is teacher quality.”
I thought at once, that’s not true because economists agree that family has a much larger impact than teachers.
Also, he is making the mistake of assuming that “educational quality=test scores.”
Then the author, Edward Glaeser of Harvard, totally confused me by writing: “In an influential paper published in 2005, economists Steven Rivkin, Eric Hanushek and John Kain examined administrative data in Texas and found that 15 percent of the differences in students’ math scores were explained by variations in teacher quality.”
Wait a minute! Didn’t he just claim that teacher quality is “the most important determinant” of educational quality? If teacher quality explains only 15 percent of the differences in test scores then his first assertion can’t be right (it is not). What happened to the other 85 percent? Can 15 percent be the most important part of 100 percent?
But then he proceeds to make an even bigger error. He writes: “My Harvard colleagues Raj Chetty and John Friedman, together with Jonah Rockoff, link school data with evidence on adult earnings and find that replacing a teacher “in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase the present value of students’ lifetime income by more than $250,000.””
To be accurate, as an earlier post showed, the Chetty study purported to show that an effective teacher would increase the lifetime earnings of an entire class–not individual students–by $250,000. For a class of 30 students, that works out to about $8,000 each in lifetime earnings; over a 40-year career, it would be an increment of some $200 per year, or less than $5 a week.
Hey, that’s a grande cappuccino at Starbucks every week! For life!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I suspect that when Dr. Glaeser suggested that teacher quality was the most important determinant of educational outcomes, he was actually meant to say is that it is the most important determinant of educational outcomes that public policy can change.
No doubt the existence of learning disabilities in as a huge. Impact on educational outcomes, but that is beyond the power of public policy to change. I suppose we might reallocate children from households with low levels of parental education and interest in their children to households with parents who have high levels of education and interest in their children’s education, but I don’t think society would accept that change in public policy.
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If that is what an intelligent Harvard professor meant to say, why didn’t he say it?
It is left to every reader’s interpretation of what he meant to say?
Looks like he needs to work on his critical thinking and writing skills.
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No, more likely is that Glaeser said what he meant.
And government (public policy) can have quite an impact on student achievement. There’s already a record on that. As Linda Darling-Hammond pointed out, “the Great Society’s War on Poverty increased investments in poor communities, substantial gains were made in equalizing educational inputs and outcomes…For a brief period in the mid-’70s, black and Hispanic students were attending college at rates comparable with whites, the only time this has happened before or since. By the mid-1970s, urban schools were spending as much as suburban schools, and paying their teachers as well; perennial teacher shortages had nearly ended; and gaps in educational attainment had closed substantially. Federally funded curriculum investments transformed teaching in many schools. Innovative schools flourished, especially in the cities. Large gains in black students’ performance throughout the 1970s and early ’80s cut the literacy achievement gap by nearly half in just fifteen years. Had this rate of progress continued, the achievement gap would have been closed by the beginning of the twenty-first century.”
See: http://www.thenation.com/article/restoring-our-schools#
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democracy,
Your quote tends to support Dr. Glaeser’s statement that high quality teaching as a large impact on student outcomes.
“By the mid-1970s, urban schools were spending as much as suburban schools, and paying their teachers as well; perennial teacher shortages had nearly ended; and gaps in educational attainment had closed substantially”
This suggests that attracting and retaining high quality teachers to urban schools became easier in the min 70’s and that explains the progress made in that time period.
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TE, more knowledgeable people than you attribute the gains for black children in the 1970s to desegregation, reduced class sizes, more pre-K.
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I am not claiming any knowledge at all. I was just pointing out that poster democracy’s quote was consistent with Dr. Glaeser’s statement. No doubt there are other statements made about education in the mid 70’s that are inconsistent with what Dr. Glaeser stated.
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Let’s see…in my comment I referenced “investments in poor communities,” “attending college,” “paying teachers well,” “teacher shortages nearly ended,” and “curriculum investments.” and Teaching Economist turned those into support for Edward Glaeser’s support for Eric Haunushek’s and Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff’s goofy statements that all student achievement is directly tied to teachers.
Wow.
Talk about not seeing the forest for the acorns.
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Dr. Glaeser’s basic point is that teachers have an important impact on student learning. I find it surprising that so many here dispute that claim and argue that teachers do not have an important impact on student learning.
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That’s not what anyone is saying at all. You come here to nitpick and argue. Focus!
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It is EXACTLY what people here are disputing. The original post by Dr Ravitch argues that the impact of teacher quality on student outcomes found in RHK is trivial (less than $5 a week, a cappuccino a week for life).
What are the policy lessons that we should take away from a conclusion that teacher quality has a trivial impact on student learning?
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you are misinterpreting what Diane is saying. She is remarking about the “economic” impact of teachers. What you ignore is that she does not think the sole or even primary measurement of teachers or of education should be reduced to economics.
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If Dr. Ravitch believes the study is really trying to measure the economic impact of high quality teaching, I think that she is misunderstanding the study. The study is trying to find evidence that high quality teaching has a positive long term benefit to students. They look at lifetime earnings as a signal of that benefit and argue that they have found evidence that good teaching has lifelong benefits to students. Dr. Ravitch is arguing that their evidence is at best very weak.
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And this huge benefit comes down to somewhere between $5-$20 a week.
Whopptifrickindo!
Fire all the bad teachers now and hire more economists to write reports proclaiming meaningless information that has no impact on the daily life in a classroom.
But of course, they have never been in one as a real teacher, so how would they know?
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Are you suggesting that there is no long term benefit to high quality teaching?
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This week is spring vacation. I am grading papers this morning and then gardening. I am not going back and forth with you. Nitpick, argue all you want. I am done. I don’t care what economists say. I live in reality. I think I will spend my extra $5 this week on a used book. Tata!
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stop defining things only in economic terms and you will see that neither Linda nor Diane is arguing that. Your problem is how you define high-quality teaching.
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I don’t think I have defined high quality teaching at all.
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TE, you really need to learn more about VAM research before you sound off.
1. Teachers change lives.
2. Test scores are weak proxies for the difference that teachers make.
3. The Chetty study cannot pinpoint the individual teachers who made a difference. It is a macro study.
4. The Chetty study examined records from the era before NCLB and high-stakes testing.
5. VAM is not only inaccurate and unstable, but demoralizing to teachers.
6. Billions will be spent to try to make it work. It doesn’t work because of point 5. Some districts have fired their Teacher of the Year.
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The results of this study suggest that even using a bad measure of teaching quality we can detect the impact of good teaching on students lives for years after the students leave the public schools. Do you mean to suggest that if they used an excellent measure of teaching quality we would discover that good teaching has no long term impact?
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now you are changing your argument. You were at least implying that Diane was hypocritical because she pointed out the weak economic impact of teachers. That in no way means she believes teachers are not important. I point that out to you and you change your line of attack.
Part of what is wrong with educational policy in this country is that too many people want to define it solely in economic terms. That flows from the President on down. I remind you that was the thrust of the scary language in the executive summary of A Nation At Risk inb 1983, an executive summary not supported by the material in the report itself, and something disproven in real time by Berliner and Biddle and by the Sandia study, and over time by the fact it was the economies of the so-called Asian tiger that wobbled, not ours.
CFR is basing its arguments within a framework of seeing education primarily for its economic benefits. If this is the strongest evidence they can offer, while the size of the sampled population is large enough that it meets the criteria for being statistically significant, it is really not particularly meaningful. That is the thrust of Ravitch’s remarks about the cup of coffee.
The real value of education is far more than economic. She has made that point many times, on this blog and elsewhere. Which is probably why she did not feel she had to repeat it in the context of this post.
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I don’t think I have changed the argument at all. I find the notion that we can detect the echoes of good teaching for years after K-12 education to be inspiring. Looking at income differences is just the easiest place to detect the echo.
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Public policy can’t alleviate poverty?
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Well, public policy can reduce poverty. Schools and teachers can’t do it alone.
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Public policy can certainly have an impact on poverty, but it can not eliminate the impact of learning disabilities and the education levels of current parents.
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sorry, but you are wrong on both assertions, perhaps because you think too narrowly about public policy. We already have examples of successful programs that address the lack of parental education, including even parental illiteracy. I have worked with several such in helping them get attention. Also, if we stopped thinking about policy silos we would realize that maintaining public libraries and expanding their services, providing instruction for parents, providing affordable health and child care, raising the minimum wage are all public policy things that can have an affect, when taken together.
As far as learning disabilities, we also know how to overcome them. Unfortunately we do not screen all children at an early age so we do not do the early intervention and support that can have a profound impact. By contrast Finland does its intervention early, fully funds the necessary support – unlike the US where SPED is paperwork intensive, and the Federal government requires but does not come close (except in two years of stimulus) to fulfilling its promised 40% share of the average additional costs.
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So perhaps 85% of the variation could be due to undiagnosed learning disabilities?
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…just like statistics, facts and findings are subject to interpretation. These are used to manipulate people by feeding them what they want to hear. So then it invalidates both sides of an issue by glossing over well-thought-out conclusions, reducing the arguments to opinions. It never ends, does it? Meanwhile, the innocemt remain the victims.
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Harvard isn’t making itself look good.
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I guess this Harvard professor never read any non-fiction articles when he was a student since he is not capable of interpreting statistical analysis.
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And what three education policy makers/enforcers went to Harvard? (Hint: Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee)
So why should Dr. Glaeser’s statements be such a surprise?
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In fairness, that is a bit deceptive. Duncan has an undergraduate degree in Sociology from Harvard College,Obama a law degree from Harvard Law, and Rhee a Masters in Public Policy from the Kennedy School. Each of those operate separately. What might be of more interest is that Glaeser did his Ph. D. in Economics at Chicago, finishing in 1992, when it was the hotbed of the kind of economic thinking associated with the likes of Milton Friedman and his acolytes.
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To me, theorizing about education if you are not going into classrooms with actual children and youth in them at least once a week is like theorizing about how to play piano when you never actually touch a piano keyboard. In short (and as a pianist) I don’t care what anyone has to say if they don’t actually go into classrooms anymore than I care about what people have to say about playing piano if they don’t actually play. Other than the parameters I have to follow as an employee of my district and bound by the laws and expectations of my state, banter about education is, to me, a way to avoid actually doing the work. My mother, a veteran teacher, always told me that children will show up for school and they will need teachers to teach them. So no matter where it is, what the rules are, how much money we have to spend, the brundt of the work falls on the ones who show up to teach. And opinions about how that should happen and why and for whom and how much money and who gets paid what don’t really matter when it comes down to conducting a class with 25 eager faces staring back at you (amidst wiggling, needing kleenex, needing band aids, having varied backgrounds and home life). The conversation needs to change to actual work in the classroom and the people talking the most need to get into the classrooms–that’s what I think.
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“. . . the people talking the most need to get into the classrooms”.
NO! We don’t need any more children harmed. Too many harmed already due to the policies (edudeforms) that those “people” have been promoting. No deben meterse la nariz donde no le llaman.
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Perhaps they should get into the classrooms as students – and they should sit down, shut up and listen for a change.
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Reblogged this on … Not the Principal's Office!!! and commented:
Diane is pretty spot on. Occasionally, all of us make mistakes..but if you do make a mistake… make sure you correct it when moving forward.
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Citing Eric Hanushek for almost anything is lalden with problems.
Hanushek touts all of the conservative, corporate-style “reform” ideas for public education: school vouchers, more standardized testing, valued-added teacher evaluations, and “accountability.” There is little if any research to support these initiatives (and much to reject them), but that never gets in the way of Hanushek or his brethren.
Hanushek has been caught fudging (and this is the polite term for it) his “research” on class size and achievement. He dismissed the results of Project STAR, the rigorous, well-designed Tennessee state study that found significant achievement gains as a result of small class size in early elementary grades, because “the kids were not tested before the program began,” that is, BEFORE they even entered kindergarten.
Hanushek’s speciality is in the areas of obfuscation and misrepresentation (although one could easily think of some more pejoratively descriptive words).
No one can reliably predict the future, yet Hanushek said we have to stick with the “reforms” of No Child left Behind, because even if those “reforms” have yet to yield much, if any, of a return on the huge increases in time and money spent on the “accountability” of high-stakes testing, “over 75 years even a reform that takes effect in 20 year… yields a real GDP that is 36 percent higher ” than without “reform.” Hanushek even makes the claim that gains as small as 0.08 standard deviations result in “trillions of dollars more in the gross domestic production.” Uh-huh. And pigs will fly.
Hanushek says that American economic competitiveness is dependent on school “reform.” He cites economist Robert Lucas to bolster his contention. Lucas is the protypical free market conservative who subscribes to and believes in “supply-side policies.” Lucas thinks that the economy has slowed due to “ fiscal policy that threatens higher taxes on the rich, and promises higher spending on programs like healthcare,” even though the U.S. has the biggest – by far – income stratification gap in the developed world, and now spends far MORE on health care than any other developed nation. Lucas said economists who supported President Obama’s stimulus package “were either incompetent (“schlock economics” was the phrase) or corrupt.”
Both Robert Lucas and Eric Hanushek signed onto 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s plans to make the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 permanent and to reduce corporate income taxes (Note: corporations now only pay about 7 percent of all federal tax revenues.).
As to the Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff “study,” it’s even worse than Diane said.
The Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff study is a good example of economists –– and the mainstream press – making causal inferences based on small correlative measures. It is much ado about nothing. It’s essential finding makes little if any sense.
The essential finding of the study is this: a high-quality teacher creates “more than a quarter of a million dollars” in higher earnings per CLASSROOM of students.
If there are an average of 30 students in these urban classrooms, that amounts to $8,333 per student over a life-time of employment. If that employment career lasts 30 years, then that’s about $278 extra a year, or $23 a month, or $5.75 a week. Wow!
More curiously, the authors of the study offer up this gem in their executive summary:
“parents whose children will earn around $40,000 in their late 20s should be willing to pay $10,000 to switch from a below-average to an above-average teacher for one grade, based on the expected increase in their child’s lifetime earnings”
Does it make sense for parents to spend $10,000 in current funds to ensure that their children can make an extra $8,333 over a life-time? Given the current job market, the off-shoring of jobs, immigrant labor, corporate efforts to drive down salaries and destroy unions, the rise in poverty, the decline in the American standard of living, and the increasing lack of social mobility, and this is their recommendation?
In the 1990s the American economy boomed. Tens of millions of jobs were created. Deficits were reduced. The federal budget was balanced multiple times and budget surpluses were generated. Republicans voted against the tax increases that allowed much of this to happen. Did anyone think to offer ANY credit to the schools, or to teachers? No.
So now, after rampant deregulation, Bush-era tax cuts by that were ill-advised and unaffordable, two badly-managed and unpaid for wars, the transformation of Wall Street into a taxpayer subsidized casino, massive corruption by bankers and hedge fund managers that continues unpunished, and a broken economy as a result of it all, conservative flacks and charlatans and opportunists like Michelle Rhee – a proven liar who presided over a culture of fear and cheating in the D.C. schools –– blame schools and teachers. If only we test more, and hold teachers accountable, they say, then teachers can produce for students an extra $5.75 a week two decades-and-a-half or more in the future (wink).
This line of illogic doesn’t even rise to the level of fantasyland.
It really is quite pathetic.
So, why does anyone believe it?
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Bruce Baker had several good response to Chetty, Friedman & Rockoff:
first this, then followed by this
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oops….laden with problems
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Arne Duncan thought the Chetty, Friedman, Rockoff study was the cat’s meow. Even after he was given the posts Bruce Baker had done taking it apart, he continued to tout it, I supposed because it reinforced his previous thinking, which was just as magical as that of Erik Hanushek, who you may remember in Waiting for Superman asserting that simply replacing the bottom level of teachers (as determined by test score) would somehow magically bring American performance to the level of Finland, without specifying how he could determine that the replacements would be any more effective (even as measured by student test scores) than those they were replacing.
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Won’t there always be a “bottom level of teachers”? Is Arne proposing to replace that level every year? It’s truly frightening that our Secretary of Education obviously lacks such basic critical thinking skills.
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I believe there is a bottom level at the USDOE and Arne is it!
Turnaround the USDOE or better yet, abolish it completely.
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To call these statements “silly” is too kind, when in fact they spring from an ideological animus against labor that’s common at places like Harvard.
Despite the misdirection about higher education being dominated by left-wingers, there is in fact a little-known and ignoble history of academics and college students happily allowing themselves to be used in attacks against labor. A modern analogue to that is TFA.
In the early twentieth century, it was common for college students, especially those a elite institutions, to be used as strikebreakers (nyceducator.com/2010/09/ivy-league-union-busters-then-and-now.html). When the “Bread and Roses” strike occurred in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1913, Harvard students were encouraged to join the State Militia, so they could be armed against the strikers. Here in NYC, Columbia students worked as strikebreakers during streetcar strikes.
Today, academic union busting takes place through bogus, brand name “research,” indoctrination with the premises of neoliberal education reform in graduate programs, and the grooming of future policy makers to implement the hostile takeover of the public schools. True to historical form, Harvard, which in many ways is now a hedge fund with a higher education subsidiary, takes the lead.
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Please have some experience
With your subject matter prior to writing about it!! I am so tired of scholars and businesspeople making such lightweight comments!
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Why doesn’t someone other than myself talk to Richard Arthur? After all he only turned around the most criminal and violent school in the U.S. at the time Castlemont High in about 1970. He did it with parent who did not even feed their children. At the statement from a student when he first got there that most of the students did not have any food at home and many none for the entire weekend he did a survey and found that about 80-90% were in this situation. He got them free breakfasts and then food for their families. He turned around that school in record time with bad families. Richard is the reason I am still doing this. It is not theoretical. If it has been done in a situation I have never heard of since who says it cannot be done again. He is also one of the founders of Whitney High School which has been for over 25 years at the top of the U.S. in performance of a public school. Think he knows something not many others seem to know? Have any of you or anyone else you know ever done this? If not, maybe you should interview the “Pro.” Talk is cheap, he has done it and others I have met have also done the same. As soon as they leave or are removed without trained people coming in those schools immediately go downhill. Is this planned to destroy success?
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