The Classic: What Does a Certificate Tell Us About Teacher Effectiveness?

Now, there are a lot of different ways to look at what makes a school “good.” For parents making a choice, you can look at ultimate outcomes, maybe college acceptance rates or, if your child has a particular talent, how strong the school is at athletics, or science, or what have you.

Despite the other articles we’ve covered in this edition, I do think we can all agree that teacher quality is very important, but the problem is it’s very difficult to define that concretely.

You might suggest, given my touching on emotion-language and other potential harms, that you simply ask or survey the students about their best teachers, but I’m not so sure about that data’s reliability.

If you had asked me my “favorite” teacher in high school, I’d’ve told you it was Mr. Kim. He had so much fun in class and we laughed a lot, but he openly told us he didn’t care if we gave each other the answers in chemistry class, and now I couldn’t tell you what a Krebs cycle is, even though I know it’s probably important.

On the contrary, my favorite teacher now is Ms. Avrich, who was unusual, and intense, but expected a lot from us, and I continue to thank her in every book I publish for helping me value the written word.