Last week, Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee announced that she was firing 241 teachers because of poor performance evaluations under a new system that holds educators accountable for their students' performance on standardized tests.
It sparked controversy, of course, and the Washington Teacher's Union said it would contest the terminations. It also stoked the fire of the old debate about whether our education system is too focused on test scores at the expense of making sure our kids will be prepared when they graduate from the school system and enter the working world.
But Rhee's larger point, which D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty supports, is that we need good, effective teachers in every classroom, and who could argue? In his Economic Scene column yesterday, David Leonhardt looked at the effect that good early education teachers have on our future earnings.
Harvard economist Raj Chetty and five other researchers examined the lives of 12,000 children who had been part of an education experiment in Tennessee in the '80s, and who were now about 30 years old. They found that some teachers were able to help students learn much more than other teachers, and the students who learned more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college.
The students with the effective kindergarten teachers were earning more. They were more likely to be saving for retirement. At the age of 27, these students with good kindergarten teachers were earning an extra $100 a year for every percentile they had moved up in test-score distribution in kindergarten. For example, a 5-year-old with a good teacher would typically jump from the 50th percentile to the 60th, and, 22 years later, could expect to earn about $1,000 a year more other students who stayed average.
Chetty's research is particularly timely considering the national pressure to tie teachers' pay to students' performance, with schools in Daytona Beach, Fla. and elsewhere already implementing such a system.
Ms. Yamaguchi, my kindergarten teacher, certainly had an effect on me. For several weeks, while the other kids ran off to the playhouses and swings during free time, she sat down with me to help me write a story I came up with about a dinosaur who fell asleep and woke up in modern time to live among humans. And today I'm a writer. I just don't write about dinosaurs anymore.
Mike Dang is a New York-based writer who covers personal finance, politics, education and technology. You can contact him here.
It sparked controversy, of course, and the Washington Teacher's Union said it would contest the terminations. It also stoked the fire of the old debate about whether our education system is too focused on test scores at the expense of making sure our kids will be prepared when they graduate from the school system and enter the working world.
But Rhee's larger point, which D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty supports, is that we need good, effective teachers in every classroom, and who could argue? In his Economic Scene column yesterday, David Leonhardt looked at the effect that good early education teachers have on our future earnings.
Harvard economist Raj Chetty and five other researchers examined the lives of 12,000 children who had been part of an education experiment in Tennessee in the '80s, and who were now about 30 years old. They found that some teachers were able to help students learn much more than other teachers, and the students who learned more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college.
The students with the effective kindergarten teachers were earning more. They were more likely to be saving for retirement. At the age of 27, these students with good kindergarten teachers were earning an extra $100 a year for every percentile they had moved up in test-score distribution in kindergarten. For example, a 5-year-old with a good teacher would typically jump from the 50th percentile to the 60th, and, 22 years later, could expect to earn about $1,000 a year more other students who stayed average.
Chetty's research is particularly timely considering the national pressure to tie teachers' pay to students' performance, with schools in Daytona Beach, Fla. and elsewhere already implementing such a system.
Ms. Yamaguchi, my kindergarten teacher, certainly had an effect on me. For several weeks, while the other kids ran off to the playhouses and swings during free time, she sat down with me to help me write a story I came up with about a dinosaur who fell asleep and woke up in modern time to live among humans. And today I'm a writer. I just don't write about dinosaurs anymore.
Mike Dang is a New York-based writer who covers personal finance, politics, education and technology. You can contact him here.
