A High-Quality Teaching Tide Lifts All Boats

In a study to be released in October in American Economics Journal: Applied Economics, researchers found that high-quality teachers had a “spillover effect,” raising the caliber of their colleagues around them, according to Education Week. The study, based on an analysis of 11 years of data on North Carolina school children, has broad implications for school staffing practices and for the current debate over merit-pay plans for teachers. “If it’s true that teachers are learning from their peers, and the effects are not small, then we want to make sure that any incentive system we put in place is going to be fostering that and not preventing it,” said C. Kirabo Jackson, an assistant professor of labor economics at Cornell University and co-author of the report. “If you give the reward at the individual level, all of a sudden my peers are no longer my colleagues-they’re my competitors. If you give it at the school level, then you’re going to foster feelings of team membership, and that increases the incentive to work together and help each other out.” Observers now wonder: Does the new teacher’s arrival motivate peers to do better, or does that teacher help other teachers by doing some of the teaching? Or are teachers themselves learning? Read more of this article at http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/09/01/03peer.html?tkn=[ZRC4i2frTDjZLzjOTpidcFhBs1ki6mQaCEF.  View the abstract of the report at http://www.nber.org/papers/w15202.pdf.