Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness — from your Dallas SAT tutor
From an article in the New Yorker, by Malcolm Gladwell:
“Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile.”
There are other factors that affect student learning, of course. But a good teacher can make a big difference. An enormous difference, as most folks know. Which is why I tell parents who ask about me as a tutor about my nominations for teaching awards from students and parents. Having an exceptional tutor doesn’t guarantee you a score on the SAT or ACT or ISEE. But it does make it much more likely that you’ll get the score that you want, given that a great tutor helps you learn more and learn it faster.