TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hanushek,Eric A.
AU  - Kain,John F.
AU  - Rivkin,Steven G.
TI  - Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 6691
PY  - 1998
Y2  - August 1998
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6691
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6691.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Eric A. Hanushek
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, CA  94305-6010
Tel: 650/736-0942
Fax: 650/723-1687
E-Mail: hanushek@stanford.edu

John Kain
Director
Cecil and Ida Green Center for the Study of Scienc
Mail Station GC21
P.O. Box 830688
Richardson, TX  75083-0688
Tel: 972-883-2555
E-Mail: N/A user is deceased

Steven G. Rivkin
Department of Economics
University of Illinois at Chicago
601 South Morgan UH725 M/C144
Chicago, IL 60607
Tel: 312.413.2368
E-Mail: sgrivkin@uic.edu
AB  - Considerable controversy surrounds the impact of schools and teachers on the achievement of students.  This paper disentangles the separate factors influencing achievement with special attention given to the role of teacher differences and other aspects of schools. Unique matched panel data from the Harvard/UTD Texas Schools Project permit distinguishing between total effects and the impact of specific, measured components of teachers and schools.  While schools are seen to have powerful effects on achievement differences, these effects appear to derive most importantly from variations in teacher quality. A lower bound suggests that variations in teacher quality account for at least 7« percent of the total variation in student achievement, and there are reasons to believe that the true percentage is considerably larger.  The subsequent analysis estimates educational production functions based on models of achievement growth with individual fixed effects.  It identifies a few systematic factors   a negative impact of initial years of teaching and a positive effect of smaller class sizes for low income children in earlier  grades   but these effects are very small relative to the effects of overall teacher quality differences.
ER  -