Good Teachers Lead to Better Pay For Students

Good teachers have an impact on the future earnings of students, according to a new Ivy League study.

Economists from Harvard and Columbia studied 2.5 million people for over 20 years and concluded that those who had good teachers in elementary and middle school earned more money as adults than peers who did not.

The New York Times reported that the study is the largest to address the controversial “value-added ratings,” which measure the impact individual teachers have on student test scores.

“That test scores help you get more education, and that more education has an earnings effect —that makes sense to a lot of people,” Robert H. Meyer, director of the Value-Added Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in this study, told the Times. “This study skips the stages, and shows that differences in teachers mean differences in earnings.”

The study’s findings are less about the difference between good and average teachers, which is modest. Instead, it sheds new light on the difference between bad and average teachers. According to the Times, “replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate.”

The study has attracted equal parts praise and criticism. It examined a larger number of students over a longer period of time with more in-depth data than many earlier studies, allowing for a deeper look at how much the quality of individual teachers matters over the long term, the Times reported.