“Everybody believes that teacher quality is very, very important,” says Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and longtime researcher of education policy. “What this paper and other work has shown is that it’s probably more important than people think. That the variations or differences between really good and really bad teachers have lifelong impacts on children.”

The average effect of one teacher on a single student is modest. All else equal, a student with one excellent teacher for one year between fourth and eighth grade would gain $4,600 in lifetime income, compared to a student of similar demographics who has an average teacher. The student with the excellent teacher would also be 0.5 percent more likely to attend college.

Perhaps just as important, given the difficulty of finding, training and retaining outstanding teachers, is that the difference in long-term outcome between students who have average teachers and those with poor-performing ones is as significant as the difference between those who have excellent teachers and those with average ones, the study found.
In the aggregate, these differences are potentially enormous. Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate. Multiply that by a career’s worth of classrooms…

Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain – NYTimes.com.

The OTA Playground is Ready!

“Ask a young child, ‘How was school today?’ and you’re likely to hear about recess. My son is 7 years old, and like many children his age, recess is the emotional core of his school day. Whether he comes home light- or heavy-hearted depends on what happened during play time. This is common. Researchers say that one of the best predictors of whether kids feel happy in school is whether they feel comfortable and competent during recess.

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The latest bad news from our nation’s schools is that the verbal scores of our top students have once again declined… Nearly nothing in our otherwise laudable and energetic education reform efforts takes direct aim at the Great Verbal Decline that took place among 17-year-olds from (roughly) 1970 to 1980.

[The way to avoid perpetuating this decline] is to make sure that every student is offered coherent knowledge about the world around them from the first days of school. This is no mere theoretical notion:

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Heritage K-8 Charter School in Escondido has been named the state’s top charter by the University of Southern California.

The annual “USC School Performance Dashboard” released Wednesday by the Center on Education Governance at the USC Rossier School of Education for the first time offers a list of California’s top 10 charters. The ranking is based on data from more than 800 of the state’s publicly financed and independently operated charters in the 2009-10 school year.

The schools were chosen based on academic ratings — including state test scores — and financial indicators, including the amount of revenue dedicated to student programs. The report was designed to strengthen accountability among California charter schools.

The study’s top 10 charters are:

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Something unprecedented is happening with charter schools in San Diego and across California. This year, San Diego County saw a 14 percent increase in the number of charter schools operating, jumping from 81 to 92. Throughout California, 115 new charters opened – the largest number to ever open in a single year in any state in the nation. This brings California to 912 charter schools serving 365,000 students. Even though the state’s funding crisis is disproportionately affecting charter schools, the pipeline for expansion is more robust than it has ever been.

What is causing this growth?
Plain and simple, it is coming in response to demand from parents. Parents are seeing the successes that charter schools are generating. In addition to offering highly innovative programs that cater to individual student needs, charter schools are becoming known for generating high levels of learning.
via Fulfilling the charter school promise – SignOnSanDiego.com.

by Robert Pondiscio, March 2nd, 2011

One of the principal arguments for a coherent, content-rich curriculum is that background knowledge — knowing something about the topic you’re reading about – compensates for weak reading ability.

But how great is the effect?  A tantalizing article by… Continue reading →

What is surprising about the newly released science scores in the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the nation’s report card, is that anybody is surprised that they were, on average, so low.

First some basics on the test and the results: Continue reading →