Education Week – Stephen Sawchuk
“The famous 1966 Coleman Report set up a longstanding (and still unsettled) debate about how much schools can do in the face of poverty and socioeconomic stratification. But one of its findings still resonates…Teachers matter…Sound familiar? It should. The last decade or so has seen dozens of studies, mostly based on sophisticated statistical analyses of growth in student scores, that have reached the same basic conclusion: Of the in-school factors affecting achievement, differences in teacher quality explain a lot of why some students do better than others…Waiting for the inevitable caveat to this walk down memory lane? Here it is: 50 years later, despite the research affirming the importance of teachers, there is not a lot of consensus about what policies will help to improve the average teacher’s overall ability.”(more)