Superstar teachers
As leaders in government and business search for ways to strengthen the U.S. recovery, new research from faculty at Harvard and Columbia indicates that elementary school teachers have an impact on how much their students earn as adults and, by extension, on the nation’s economy. “If an elementary school student has an excellent teacher even for a single year, it boosts their income by an average of about 2 percent per year,” says Raj Chetty, professor of economics at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a co-author of the study with Harvard Kennedy School’s John Friedman and Columbia Business School’s Jonah Rockoff. “To put that in perspective, if we can find a way to raise gross domestic product (GDP) by 2 percent, you’re talking about nearly ending the Great Recession every year. By economic standards, it’s a huge deal.” Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff’s research isolated the long-term impact of high value-added...