Best teachers get top marks from study.

Sydney Morning Herald, John Garnaut. May 21, 2007

SCHOOL students who have good teachers take half as long to learn their course material as those with poor teachers, new research shows. The report provides the first objective evidence of which teachers are adding value to the academic performance of their students - and which teachers are letting children down. "The top 10 per cent of teachers achieve in half a year what the bottom 10 per cent achieve in a full year," says the author, economist Andrew Leigh, of the Australian National University.

Dr Leigh tracked three years of numeracy and literacy exam scores for 90,000 primary school students and matched them against 10,000 teachers. Good teaching - measured by improvements in exam scores - has almost no relationship with teacher experience, qualifications or any of the criteria currently used by most schools to hire or reward teachers. Instead, the best teachers appear to be good at their jobs because of innate factors like personal drive, curiosity and ability to relate to students.
"Most of the differences between teachers are due to factors not captured on the payroll database," said Dr Leigh. The study shows female teachers are more likely to improve student literacy, while males are better at teaching maths. Surprisingly, it shows students in large classes performed better than those in small ones - although it doesn't claim a causative link. It also finds no positive effects of teacher qualifications on test scores, a finding which challenges the Federal Opposition's policy of paying teachers more for better academic qualifications rather than for observed ability.

The study is likely to receive a frosty reception from teacher unions and state education bureaucracies which say exam scores cannot be used to measure teacher quality. But it has been seized upon by private schools and the Federal Government. The executive director of the Association of Independent Schools of NSW, Geoff Newcombe, said Dr Leigh's "groundbreaking" findings paved the way for teachers to be partly rewarded by the exam score improvements of their students. "It's complex but we can't stick our head in the sand and say it's too hard," he said.

The Federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop, said the report supports her policy of introducing performance pay for teachers next year. "This makes a mockery of education union and Labor Party claims that teacher performance cannot be measured," she said. The schools data for Dr Leigh's study, which includes year 3 and 5 numeracy and literacy exam scores and information about individual teachers, was provided by the Queensland Education Department after NSW and Victoria had refused to make their information available. As well as being used to identify, reward and retain the best teachers, Dr Leigh says his methodology could be used to send the best teachers where they could contribute most. If indigenous students had teachers from the top quarter rather than the bottom, then the findings imply the two-year black-white test score gap could be closed within seven years.