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When teachers leave schools, overall morale appears to suffer enough that student achievement declines—both for those taught by the departed teachers and by students whose teachers stayed put, concludes a study recently presented at a conference held by the Center for Longitudinal Data in Education Research. The impact of teacher turnover is one of the teacher-quality topics that's been hard for researchers to get their arms around. The phenomenon of high rates of teacher turnover has certainly been proven to occur in high-poverty schools more than low-poverty ones. The eminently logical assumption has been that such turnover harms student achievement.

Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.

“In education, it is the worst of times and the best of times,” said Claude Steele, dean of the Stanford School of Education, at a lunchtime presentation Tuesday that discussed a partnership between Stanford and the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). Steele opened the event by stating that this “partnership is a model for how schools of education can relate to real school districts.”
The panelists said that though school districts are facing budget cuts, changes in technology and educational research can make it possible to get rid of old deadwood methodologies that no longer work.

CEPA unites an array of nationally prominent Stanford scholars with diverse perspectives and methodologies to forge fresh education policy approaches that are both pragmatic and proven. This fall, the center brought together four leading education policy experts from across campus—Susanna Loeb (education), Bill Koski (law), Michael Kirst (education), and Terry Moe (political science and the Hoover Institution)—to engage in a lively discussion on teacher unions at the inaugural CEPA Supper.

As overall income inequality grew in the last four decades, high- and low-income families have become increasingly less likely to live near one another. Mixed income neighborhoods have grown rarer, while affluent and poor neighborhoods have grown much more common. In fact, the share of the population in large and moderate-sized metropolitan areas who live in the poorest and most affluent neighborhoods has more than doubled since 1970, while the share of families living in middle-income neighborhoods dropped from 65 percent to 44 percent.

Doctoral student Heather Hough (BA ’02), Professor Susanna Loeb, and Professor (Research) David Plank at Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA) have been collaborating with the district to document the passage of this policy. Their research has looked at what it took to induce the broader public to open its purse strings, and how the district and the teachers’ union consulted, negotiated, and compromised to determine how those funds were to be used.

Teachers and principals play the most direct and central role in creating learning opportunities for students in our schools. Indeed, there are striking examples that show the power that exceptional teachers and school leaders have to make a difference for students. This is obvious. This comports with personal experience. We also know this empirically. A weaker math teacher, for example, might get students to learn about a half-year of material; a strong teacher can get the same children to learn a year-and-a-half, or three times as much.