Study Measures Impact of Teacher Quality on Life After Schooling

According to a newly published study by economics professor Gary Chamberlain, having higher quality teachers in elementary and middle school predicts an increase in students’ college attendance and income.

“This study definitely offers suggestive evidence, certainly in a predictive sense, that teacher quality matters,” Chamberlain said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette, the University’s official news publication.

“What we’re trying to do is put numbers on the variation in teacher quality and how large an effect it has on test score outcomes, and later outcomes, like college attendance and income.”

According to Chamberlain, existing empirical evidence does not provide strong evidence for the effect of measured characteristics of teachers—such as their experience, education, test scores—in the determination of students’ academic strength.

In order to measure the importance of unmeasured characteristics, Chamberlain’s research focused on outcomes for multiple elementary and middle classrooms with the same teacher. He compared the average reading and math scores students received near the end of the school year with the fraction of the class attending college at age 20 and the average earnings of the class at age 28.

Using test score data as a proxy for teaching quality, Chamberlain found that a one standard deviation increase in teaching quality predicts a minimum 0.13 percent increase in college attendance.

When using college attendance to measure teacher quality, a one standard deviation increase in teacher quality predicts a minimum 0.79 percent increase in college attendance—a “large” effect, according to Chamberlain.

Chamberlain’s research also showed that students who had higher quality teachers earned approximately 200 dollars more per year—an increase of approximately 1 percent.

Chamberlain acknowledged, however, that many questions still need to be answered, including the effectiveness of different teaching methods, the effectiveness of different ways of training teachers, and the importance of the content and organization of teachers’ curricula.

“By observing a teacher in multiple classrooms, with data on student backgrounds before the class and outcomes after the class, I can make inferences on how much of the output variation is due to variation in teacher quality,” Chamberlain wrote in an email to The Crimson.

“But then one wants to try to measure the specific inputs that matter.”