Thompson: Words Have Meanings

Unless he also was misquoted by Steve Brill, Dan Goldhaber said "The effect of increases in teacher quality swamps the impact of any other educational investment, such as reductions in class size." Goldhaber has a case regarding class size, but does he really have evidence to refute James Heckman, Russ Whitehurst, and Dan Willingham that high-quality pre-school, health and nutrition, intensive diagnostic assessment for reading comprehension, and/or an effective and engaging curriculum would be more cost-effective? When writing for RAND, Goldhaber compared teacher effects to other "school-related factors," which are much smaller than outside-of-school factors, and that are measured because they are currently in existence.  That's a long way from the grandiose words in Brill's opinion piece.

Comments

[Claus]

Here's what Whitehurst writes: "We conclude that the effect sizes for curriculum are larger, more certain, and less expensive than for the Obama-favored policy levers." That's not to argue that curriculum is necessarily more important that teacher quality. But it does suggest that, in Whitehurst's view at least, curriculum reforms are likely to have a bigger impact than many of the teacher effectiveness reforms currently under discussion.