This article highlights that there can be vast differences in effectiveness from one teacher to another. (No surprise, it's true in all professions.) I don't th

This article highlights that there can be vast differences in effectiveness from one teacher to another. (No surprise, it's true in all professions.) I don't think it's in-depth enough to draw a conclusion about how much of a child's education is due to a quality teacher vs. parents/family/community. In fact, I don't think it is even effective in showing that the one teacher, whose students tended to do better, is a better teacher than the other one. The article just doesn't go into enough detail about the communities around the schools, resources available, the families of the kids, etc. We have three elementary schools within one mile of each other. The schools have similar profiles with a fairly high number kids on free/reduced-price lunch. The teachers from the different schools train with one another. They come from the same education programs. Yet, my daughter's school significantly outperforms the other schools. One difference comes from the parents and the culture/education opportunities they can provide outside the school. Parents regularly take their kids to plays, musicals, museums, historical sites, etc. They also read with their kids nightly. Another important difference is the PTA. Ours is very active. We developed an after school program that offers introductory theater, music, visual arts, sports, marine biology, etc. Thanks to a state legislative grant, we can offer these classes for free to kids whose families can't afford them . Our parents knew enough to look for grants when they started the program. Last year we developed a full theater program for kids who wanted more involved productions. If you're looking at economic classifications, the other two schools' communities can be described as working and lower middle class. Our community is working, lower and upper middle class. Again, the stat on free/reduced-price lunches is similar. The schools' budgets are roughly the same accounting for number of students and age of the buildings. We have kids classified as homeless in our school, as I'm sure the other schools have as well. Yet, our school performs significantly better. The difference is the learning that's happening outside the school. Last year I attended a talk by the president of the principals' association in my state. He cited a study that estimated 48% of a child's education comes from outside the school. There is certainly room for improvement for some teachers. There is also room for modernization in teaching methodology. But, we won't improve education for students as long as we're only looking along one axis for improvement. (Btw, I'm not an educator. I'm a software engineer who happens to be very involved in the PTA for my daughter's school.)