The Value of a Good Teacher (in $)
By Christopher Shea
- (Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)
What’s a good teacher worth? A lot less than he or she used to be, judging by teacher’s salaries. The average male teacher made more than the average male worker in 1940, for example; now male teachers languish in the bottom third of earners.
Yet good teachers improve students’ cognitive abilities, as measured on tests, and better cognitive abilities improve their earnings over a lifetime.
(Back in October, former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and former D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty presented their own manifesto for improving student performance).
In an NBER working paper, the economist Eric A. Hanushek attempts to gauge how much a good teacher adds to students’ economic potential. He finds that a teacher at the 84th percentile of performance raises the future earnings of a class of 20 kids, in today’s dollars, by