Mr. Chetty and his colleagues — one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 — 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.
Obviously, great kindergarten teachers are not going to start making $320,000 anytime soon. Still, school administrators can do more than they’re doing.
They can pay their best teachers more, as Pittsburgh soon will, and give them the support they deserve. Administrators can fire more of their worst teachers, as Michelle Rhee, the Washington schools chancellor, did last week. Schools can also make sure standardized tests are measuring real student skills and teacher quality, as teachers’ unions have urged.
This is a superb read, however the article states that this far into formalized education we are really still discovering how to quantify the measure of how "good" a specific students education is/was because of so many variables related to the teacher and the class (size, socioeconomic factors, etc). The third paragraph seemed to have come out of nowhere had me wondering that if we are still confused about how well we can judge a students education with these factors then how on earth are we going to be able to measure "good" teachers (vs "bad" ones to fire).
The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers
Also as a side note: the word Kindergarten is a German word meaning "children's garden." I had always assumed (and used to say '
Kindergarden') but never knew for sure. The idea of Kindergartens seemed to have spawned in Hungary.
education, kindergarten