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The chetty paper is a classic. They claim that raising a teacher from -2sigma to 0 adds 1% to a student's earnings. http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_

The chetty paper is a classic. They claim that raising a teacher from -2sigma to 0 adds 1% to a student's earnings. http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf If you scroll to table 3, you'll see how huge an effect non-teacher quality factors have. Table 5 shows huge specific roles for parent income and minority vs non-minority status. Perhaps a simpler way to think of it: if teacher quality dominated everything else, then a teacher getting poor scores out of a class of poor black kids, relative to another teacher getting great scores out of a class of rich asian kids, would be entirely to blame. Do you really believe this?

thaumasiotes 10y ago
> if teacher quality dominated everything else, then a teacher getting poor scores out of a class of poor black kids, relative to another teacher getting great scores out of a class of rich asian kids, would be entirely to blame. Well, using the weaker-but-still-absurd claim that teacher quality matters more than student quality (but isn't necessarily the only thing that matters at all), that teacher would only be almost entirely to blame. However, switching the teachers around should cause the poor black kids to start outscoring the rich asian kids.