Although previous studies suggested that the beneficial effects of a good kindergarten teacher fade over time, a new study indicates the opposite, making a good case for the value of education.

• Past studies measuring the effectiveness of kindergarten teachers use standardized test scores to acquire results.
• According to this method, having better teachers improves your performance for awhile, but by the time you get to junior-high and high school, the effects are negligible.
• A new study, measuring income instead of test scores, found the opposite: the benefits of having a good teacher in kindergarten coincides with increased average income later in life.
• The effects of good education are still hotly debated, but this study makes a case for the value of skilled teachers.

Facts and Figures

• A team of six researchers studied the life paths of 12,000 people who had been part of an educational experiment as children. They are now approximately 30 years old.
• The team discovered that, by age 27, these people were earning about $100 per year more for every percentile point they had moved up in test-score distributions in kindergarten.
• If this study is accurate, its authors estimate that an exceptional kindergarten teacher is worth $320,000 per year.

Best Quote

“The worry has been that education didn’t translate into earnings. But this is telling us that it does and that the fade-out effect is misleading in some sense.”–Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth