One week ago in Glynn County, across all our public schools and many of our private ones, K-12 students returned for a new year of learning, laughing, and growing in wisdom and in stature. As a parent, an educator, and a life-long learner, I love this time of year. As a caregiver to children with disabilities and traumatic pasts, I also have a lot of anxiety around this day. For many children, learning and laughing are hard, and school is not a place of joy or felt safety.
Our schools’ teachers, counselors, and administrators are gifted daily opportunities to meet students where they are academically, socially, and emotionally and, through meaningful and intentional relationships, to move struggling students toward success for today and hope for the future.
And, as most of us know anecdotally, good teachers do, indeed, make all the difference. On a personal note, I am immensely grateful for the Glynn County educators who have been difference-makers for the children in my care.
Research from the field of Education Economics provides evidence, more generally, that our anecdotes and gut feelings about teachers are true.
Researchers for decades have studied variations in student achievement and have attempted to uncover causes behind these variations. Across nearly all of these studies, teachers always emerge as the single most influential factor in determining student achievement. Teachers matter more than any other political talking point, including class size, funding, geography, or student and family demographics.
Studies show that identical students who start a school year at identical achievement levels can emerge an entire year apart in terms of achievement gains due solely to the teacher to whom they are assigned. And these variations matter, not just in terms of test scores and student achievement, but also in terms of future earnings. One study found that if we calculate the average effectiveness of a teacher, a teacher one standard deviation above that mean who teaches a class of 20 students adds over $400,000 per year in present value of student future earnings. Over a decades-long career, this certainly adds up!
The same study showed that improving effectiveness of the bottom 5-8 percent of U.S. teachers to make them average, through professional development or replacement, would add increase our annual GDP growth rate by over 1%, in perpetuity.
Clearly, teachers matter. What makes a good teacher is a question harder to answer. Even with hundreds of studies validating the importance of effective teachers in determining student success, there is little scientific consensus on how specific attributes or practices of teachers contribute to their effectiveness.
A recent article combining results of 40 studies on how teacher characteristics affect teacher effectiveness found over 200 different conclusions. The authors did attempt to synthesize the results, dividing teacher characteristics into three categories: 1) sociodemographic (fixed attributes), acquired (training and experience), and psychological (personality and self-efficacy). They concluded that psychological characteristics have the greatest influence on student success, and the most impactful of these characteristics is a reflective attitude—the willingness and ability of the teacher to think about past experiences in order to learn from them and grow for the future. Teacher training and experience alone, separate of the reflective process, have almost no effect on student success.
The good news is psychological attributes often also can be acquired. Educators—and I’m looking at me, too, not just my K-12 friends—need to practice pause, keep open minds and hearts, be curious, and be willing to shift and change to meet the needs before us. When we do, we can make a multi-million dollar difference!
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Dr. Melissa Trussell is a professor in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia who works with the college’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. Contact her at mtrussell@ccga.edu. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the College of Coastal Georgia.
Reg Murphy Center