Attracting and retaining the best and brightest teachers
Posted by Jeffrey Roy on November 7, 2008
Attracting and retaining the best and brightest teachers in the Franklin public school system has been one of the top priorities for the School Committee. Our last post on teachers can be viewed by clicking here. We continuously look for ways to improve the quality of our educational workforce. We have been extremely successful in coordinating this effort, but recent budget issues have placed a strain on our ability to maintain our high standards. We will continue to pursue these efforts nonetheless.
Today, the Boston Globe published an interesting op-ed piece which highlights the need for good teaching. In the piece, we are reminded that President-Elect Barack Obama has declared that “now is the time to finally meet our moral obligation – to provide every child a world-class education.” To do so, we need to focus on teachers in the classroom. As the article further notes:
The clearest result from decades of education research is the importance of teacher quality. My colleague Tom Kane finds that students who are lucky enough to get a teacher in the top quarter of the teacher-quality distribution jump 10 percentile points in the student achievement distribution relative to children who end up with less able teachers. Improving teacher quality has about twice the impact on student outcomes as radically reducing class size.
Just as the human capital of our citizens will determine the strength of our nation, the human capital of our teachers will determine the quality of our schools. The first step toward improving teacher quality is to attract more talented teachers. The second step is to improve teacher selection on the job, promoting the best and encouraging the worst to help society in some other way.
The piece was written by Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University. He is the director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. To view the complete article, click here.
