And here’s the other weird thing. Everyone else has found that teacher effects on test scores decay very quickly over time. Chetty has sort of found that up to 25% of them persist, but he doesn’t really seem interested in defending that claim and agrees that probably test scores just fade away. Yet as he himself admits, good teachers’ impact on earnings works as if there were zero fadeout of teacher effects.
Students are pretty short-sighted and high school seems to be designed everywhere to have them worry only about the next test rather than their education as a whole.
I’m speaking from personal experience, but when I think back to a subject I studied in high school I remember nearly only what I learned with good teachers, and nothing of what I learned with bad ones.
A single good teacher makes me now remember a subject with some amount of interest, if I had none it’s significantly harder to feel something like that.
I had to study a second time nearly all of the high school knowledge I needed to use in my university, so I think the attitude toward a subject (or the experience of learning) lasts a lot more than the notions you needed to fork out for a test.
When you are in high school, you have no say in what you have to study and get graded all the time, so I guess a new teacher can make you dislike a subject you liked the year before pretty fast.
More generally, it feels to me like, from these findings, lots and lots of stuff that happens in your education affects by a lot your income. Basically we’d expect to see that the possible income values are all over the place. I’d suspect that this means that whatever control were put in place for these studies weren’t enough, and that a many factors that cause probabilistic income shifts and the possible stuff that might happen in a single year of preschool/high-school education weren’t adequately controlled for and there’s something subtle that’s screwing up everyone’s results.
In fact, these groups are the strongest opponents of the above studies – not because they doubt good teachers have an effect, but because in order to prove that effect you have to concede that good teaching is easy to measure, which tends to turn into proposals to use VAM to measure teacher performance and then fire underperformers.
I guess that this isn’t the main point of the post, but I still feel it’s worth to point out this way you’ll select to have only teachers that spend all their time preparing their classes to game the evaluation system. From what I understood about the USA educational system It’s already a serious problem, I can’t even imagine how badly things would turn when a test score would determine the chance people kept their job...
Students are pretty short-sighted and high school seems to be designed everywhere to have them worry only about the next test rather than their education as a whole.
I’m speaking from personal experience, but when I think back to a subject I studied in high school I remember nearly only what I learned with good teachers, and nothing of what I learned with bad ones.
A single good teacher makes me now remember a subject with some amount of interest, if I had none it’s significantly harder to feel something like that.
I had to study a second time nearly all of the high school knowledge I needed to use in my university, so I think the attitude toward a subject (or the experience of learning) lasts a lot more than the notions you needed to fork out for a test.
When you are in high school, you have no say in what you have to study and get graded all the time, so I guess a new teacher can make you dislike a subject you liked the year before pretty fast.
More generally, it feels to me like, from these findings, lots and lots of stuff that happens in your education affects by a lot your income. Basically we’d expect to see that the possible income values are all over the place. I’d suspect that this means that whatever control were put in place for these studies weren’t enough, and that a many factors that cause probabilistic income shifts and the possible stuff that might happen in a single year of preschool/high-school education weren’t adequately controlled for and there’s something subtle that’s screwing up everyone’s results.
I guess that this isn’t the main point of the post, but I still feel it’s worth to point out this way you’ll select to have only teachers that spend all their time preparing their classes to game the evaluation system. From what I understood about the USA educational system It’s already a serious problem, I can’t even imagine how badly things would turn when a test score would determine the chance people kept their job...