Key Findings From Research on Teacher Quality and Student Achievement

Teacher Quality And Student Achievement: Key Lessons learned

Teacher quality stands out in the research for its potential to close the gap in academic achievement between students from traditionally poor, non-white, and/or urban backgrounds and their better-off peers. This summary highlights the most salient findings of the research on teacher quality.

Good teachers have a substantial effect on student achievement, especially when assigned to work with disadvantaged students.

1.  Teacher quality more heavily influenced differences in student performance than did race, class, or school of the student; disadvantaged students benefited more from good teachers than did advantaged students (Nye, Konstantopoulos, & Hedges, 2004).

2.  Achievement gains from having an effective teacher could be almost three times as large for African American students than for white students, even when comparing students with the same prior school achievement (Sanders & Rivers, 1996).

3.  The effects of teacher quality accumulate over the years. Fifth-grade math students in Tennessee who had three consecutive highly effective teachers scored between 52 and 54 percentile points ahead of students who had three consecutive teachers who were least effective, even though both groups had the same achievement rates prior to entering second grade. A similar study in Texas showed a difference of 34 percentile points in reading and 49 percentile points in math (Sanders & Rivers, 1996; Jordan, Mendro, & Weerasinghe, 1997). 

Teachers with four characteristics, or dimensions, of teacher quality consistently generate higher student achievement: content knowledge, experience, teacher training and certification, and general cognitive skills.

4.  A background in the subject matter being taught makes a difference in how well students perform. The presence of a teacher who does not have at least a minor in the subject matter that he or she teaches accounts for around 20 percent of the variation in NAEP scores (Darling-Hammond, 1999).

5.  Graduate education in a subject area makes a difference. An advanced degree specific to the subject area that a teacher teaches is associated with higher achievement (Goldhaber & Brewer, 1996).

6.  More years of teaching experience consistently translate into higher student test scores. Conversely, the presence of new teachers in a school was one of the strongest predictors of higher dropout rates in a sample of California schools (Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine, 1996; Fetler, 2001).

7.  Newly hired uncertified teachers may not perform as well as other teachers. Students taught by new certified teachers scored better on a state math achievement test than did students taught by new teachers who were not certified (Darling-Hammond, 1999; Laczko-Kerr & Berliner, 2002). Similarly, teachers with emergency teaching certificates did not perform as well as others (Fetler, 1999).

8.  Findings from evaluations of alternatively certified teachers are mixed. The performance of alternatively certified teachers performed as well as, if not better than, their more traditionally prepared colleagues, but did not perform as well as new teachers who had pedagogical training and who were certified (Raymond, Fletcher, & Luque, 2001; Darling-Hammond, Holzman, Gatlin, & Heilig, 2005).