05:24 am - QotD
"Mr. Chetty and his colleagues [...] estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That's the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn't take into account social gains, like better health and less crime." -- David Leonhardt, 2010-07-28 in The New York Times (writing about a study by Raj Chetty of Harvard, looking at adult differences between people who had been part of another study on early education in the 1980s)
For context, a summary from earlier in the article:
"Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. And just as in other studies, the effect largely disappeared by junior high, based on test scores. Yet when Mr. Chetty and his colleagues took another look at the students in adulthood, they discovered that the legacy of kindergarten had re-emerged.
"Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.
"All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile -- a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher -- could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too."