“An affirmative answer to this question is becoming a cliché. And you probably expect a guy whose career is in teacher education to give an enthusiastic “Yes!” But it is not so simple. On one hand, current research has overcome simplistic assertions of past decades that teachers don’t matter. When we used crude proxies to measure teacher effectiveness (such as years of service, education level, or size of paychecks), teachers did not seem to matter. Once we started to use more sophisticated ways of looking into what teachers actually do in classroom, it became clear that the quality of teaching really matters a lot, and directly influences students’ performance.”


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