{"id":3139,"date":"2008-11-11T10:02:36","date_gmt":"2008-11-11T10:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/11\/fixing-education-is-expensive\/"},"modified":"2008-11-11T10:02:36","modified_gmt":"2008-11-11T10:02:36","slug":"fixing-education-is-expensive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/11\/fixing-education-is-expensive\/","title":{"rendered":"Fixing Education Is Expensive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Edward Glaeser has an op-ed in the Boston Globe<\/cite> arguing for more education funding<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n

[…]Attracting better teachers will also require much more money than $18 billion per year committed by President-elect Obama. Higher pay for successful teachers will make teaching more financially attractive. Just as importantly, it will send the message that our society values its educators.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course, as Brad DeLong notes<\/a>, spending money on teachers is not a popular option. And we’re talking about a lot<\/strong> of money, here. As I pointed out a while back<\/a>, a college graduate with good math skills has a wealth of options with starting salaries at least $10,000 higher than teaching. And according to the government<\/a>, there are about 4 million teachers in the US. Increasing all of their salaries by $10,000 would cost $40 billion, more than double the $18 billion Glaeser cites. And that probably underestimates the real cost of elevating the prestige of teaching to a point where it becomes competitive.<\/p>\n

This is probably the best way to judge whether a politician or pundit is really serious about reforming or improving education. If they’re talking about investing seriously large sums of money in our schools, they’re probably worth listening to. If they’re talking about spending a few million dollars, and counting on some gimmick to make everything wonderful, they’re not serious, and ought to be ignored.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Edward Glaeser has an op-ed in the Boston Globe arguing for more education funding: 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… Continue reading Fixing Education Is Expensive<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}