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I'm left with two thoughts after reading this, either teacher quality doesn't matter or our ability to measure teacher quality is garbage. The latter is no mor
by Eridrus 8y ago
I'm left with two thoughts after reading this, either teacher quality doesn't matter or our ability to measure teacher quality is garbage.
The latter is no more satisfying because when you can't tell the difference between good and bad you get a market for lemons, so you end up with a pile of bad teachers despite the fact that good ones would help.
- acdha 8y agoI’m not sure this is less depressing but I think it’s not that teacher quality doesn’t master but that we focus on that societally because it’s the easiest to do something about: making teachers’ jobs have higher stakes, etc. is much cheaper than addressing poverty or changing culture so we keep hoping that one more round will do it even though we have close to a century of studies suggesting that we should focus on poverty instead.
- ncphillips 8y agoThe quality of the teacher does matter, but OP says it’s not the constraint for most children. This is basic theory of constraints: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The quality of a students education is a function of many variables, and the teacher is just one of those variables. This is why rewarding a teacher based on their classes performance is unfair. By luck they may either get a class filled with exceptional and privileged students, or a class of children with abuse and attention problems. The only way to really get a good measure the quality of a teacher, would be to control the quality of the parents, and all the other variables too.