Rich parents don’t hire teachers; they pay private school tuition, and the school management ends up setting the salary. What incentive does a private school administrator have to pay teachers a lot of money? Parents don’t usually choose a school based on direct evaluations of teacher quality, and schools with impressive reputations already charge parents a small fortune.
I suspect that, in large part, better schools are better because they have better students, not because they have better teachers. Take the teachers and other staff of the world’s best high-tuition private school in the world, give them a building in the middle of Newark, NJ, and give them a random sample of the students that the “failing” school system of Newark has to teach, and what you’ll get will be a bad school.
I actually recall a study (but not the citation) that did this experiment, and the school with good resources and underprivileged children is a bad school (measured by test scores.) On the other hand, if you move a kid from an underperforming school in a bad neighborhood to a high-performing school with mostly affluent kids, the poor kid usually performs in line with his new peers.
So I’d infer that what matters most for school performance is a critical mass of kids who have something in the cluster of stuff that correlates with high socioeconomic status.
Rich parents don’t hire teachers; they pay private school tuition, and the school management ends up setting the salary. What incentive does a private school administrator have to pay teachers a lot of money? Parents don’t usually choose a school based on direct evaluations of teacher quality, and schools with impressive reputations already charge parents a small fortune.
I suspect that, in large part, better schools are better because they have better students, not because they have better teachers. Take the teachers and other staff of the world’s best high-tuition private school in the world, give them a building in the middle of Newark, NJ, and give them a random sample of the students that the “failing” school system of Newark has to teach, and what you’ll get will be a bad school.
I actually recall a study (but not the citation) that did this experiment, and the school with good resources and underprivileged children is a bad school (measured by test scores.) On the other hand, if you move a kid from an underperforming school in a bad neighborhood to a high-performing school with mostly affluent kids, the poor kid usually performs in line with his new peers.
So I’d infer that what matters most for school performance is a critical mass of kids who have something in the cluster of stuff that correlates with high socioeconomic status.