“The message is to fire people sooner rather than later”
The headline for this post is from a researcher quoted in today’s front page article in The New York Times headlined Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain.
Here are some quotes from this ringing endorsement of using value-added measures to evaluate teachers:
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.
“If you leave a low value-added teacher in your school for 10 years, rather than replacing him with an average teacher, you are hypothetically talking about $2.5 million in lost income,” said Professor Friedman, one of the