![]() ![]() Good teachers and smaller class sizes are critical for early childhood education. What happens before age 7 really matters. The research suggests a couple of things: Balancing classrooms in early childhood education is also important. That’s as good an argument against tracking as you’ll find. There was a tendency for the mix of kids in a class to affect test scores (but not necessarily long term outcomes), where an increase of kids in poverty in any given class resulted in lower scores.This doesn’t bother me too much: districts can’t exclude kids anyway so it’s comforting that the variables we can control - class size and teacher experience - make a difference. They conceded that this may have some impact on results, but they can’t quantify it precisely. They also noted that it was difficult (nearly impossible) to separate some variables in the research beyond class size and teacher experience, notably the effect of the entire class - the mix of children, genders, races, personalities, abilities - on results.Experience was the only measurable characteristic that predicted teacher quality. What they can say is that it’s not race, college degree held, or career progress. Researchers can’t really say what teacher characteristics were responsible for this effect.What is fascinating, is that both studies I have cited have measured the impact of very early childhood education - Preschool and Kindergarten, respectively. I have written about “soft skills” in this space before: those skills taught in school that are not really measurable on tests but that have an impact that may last well into adulthood. Results suggest that high quality Kindergarten classrooms may build non-cognitive skills that have returns in the labor market but do not improve performance on standardized tests. ![]() The effects were especially marked for African American boys and those who entered with lower scores.Students were more likely to get married, own a home, and live in neighborhoods that were safer and more economically stable.Students in smaller classes with experienced teachers were more likely to have a job with a 401k plan, which the researchers used as a proxy for a good, higher-paying job.Students in smaller classes (+/- 15 kids) were 6.7% more likely to attend college before age 25 than students in larger classes.This amounted to a $300,000 increase in total earnings over the student’s career. Children assigned to good classrooms (experienced, capable teachers, smaller class sizes) were earning 3% more than those from not-so-good classrooms.He took the Tennessee data on Kindergarten placement and correlated it with tax records and other documentation and found some really startling results: Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard, wondered if the researchers hadn’t studied the effects on students long enough to get a true picture of the impact that might be occurring. This is not an unusual finding: a similar study on Pre-K found that by grade 3, the effect of preschool on test scores had faded. That was according to an experiment in Tennessee designed to measure the academic impact of Kindergarten placement on children in low-income schools. By grade 8 or so, the impact fades to the point that those children look about like their peers who were not placed with a good teacher. How important is a good Kindergarten teacher? When measured in terms of lasting impact on test scores, the answer is “not very” gains on standardized test scores actually fade over the subsequent elementary years. ![]()
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