Want better schools? Hire better teachers

PRESIDENT-ELECT Barack Obama has declared that "now is the time to finally meet our moral obligation - to provide every child a world-class education."

But how? Mindless increases in school spending will be an expensive fiasco that will generate more disillusionment than human capital.

The clearest result from decades of education research is the importance of teacher quality. My colleague Tom Kane finds that students who are lucky enough to get a teacher in the top quarter of the teacher-quality distribution jump 10 percentile points in the student achievement distribution relative to children who end up with less able teachers. Improving teacher quality has about twice the impact on student outcomes as radically reducing class size.

Just as the human capital of our citizens will determine the strength of our nation, the human capital of our teachers will determine the quality of our schools. The first step toward improving teacher quality is to attract more talented teachers. The second step is to improve teacher selection on the job, promoting the best and encouraging the worst to help society in some other way.

Obama's appeal to younger Americans gives him a tremendous edge in attracting new teachers. People under 30 voted for him by a 2-to-1 margin. He can ensure that the movement that got him elected will create lasting social change if he exhorts its members to serve their country in the classroom.

Our president-to-be enjoys a second advantage in attracting new teachers. He's facing the maelstrom of a recession. In their new book "The Race between Technology and Education," Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz write that "from 1929 to 1936 the graduation rate in the states of the Middle Atlantic had more than doubled and the region had been catapulted into the high school movement." In those years, bad economic times meant that students were happy to stay in school. Today, lean years will make teaching a relatively more attractive profession.

Attracting better teachers will also require much more money than $18 billion per year committed by President-elect Obama. Higher pay for successful teachers will make teaching more financially attractive. Just as importantly, it will send the message that our society values its educators.

Schools can also attract more talent with an environment that welcomes talented outsiders instead of erecting bureaucratic barriers that prevent their success. The literature on teacher certification finds few benefits from that hurdle. By contrast, Teach for America has achieved remarkable results by putting capable young people, often with little formal training as teachers, in classrooms. The experience illustrates that it isn't easy to assess teacher quality with standard teaching credentials.

If attracting a wave of good people into teaching is the first step, the second step is keeping the best teachers and redirecting the rest. Performance in the classroom is the best way to know if a teacher is a success. Teacher promotion and tenure needs to be based on clear performance measures, including student test scores. Perhaps teachers unions could start endorsing the use of test scores to evaluate their members and determine tenure.

Even without formal performance metrics, principals are quite able to assess pedagogical talent. Several years ago, New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein championed a deal where principals received greatly enhanced authority in exchange for greater accountability. That sounds like a good deal for parents and children. Let the principals choose better-performing teachers and require the principals to leave if their school doesn't improve. Principals have inside knowledge. Like CEOs throughout our economy, they need to have the independent authority to use that knowledge.

This election marks a new beginning. Improving our schools may be the most important way that President-elect Obama can leave America stronger than he found it. He must avoid any small plans. America doesn't need an $18 billion Band-Aid. The country needs a massive education overhaul, and better teachers will be the most important element in that overhaul. Spending more and attracting able teachers is the best way to use resources to improve the human capital of our children and the future of our nation.

Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, is director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.