Want students to perform better? Ensure teachers are better paid

Many factors contribute to student success in schools, and conventional wisdom would predict that the smarter the teacher, the better the learning outcome.However, typical measures of teacher qualifications, such as advanced degrees and experience levels, do not necessarily translate to classroom effectiveness.Using data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to estimate the effects of teachers’ cognitive skills on student achievement across 31 OECD countries, researchers, who published their study Do Smarter Teachers Make Smarter Students? in Education Next, found that students whose teachers have higher cognitive skills tend to perform better academically.Teacher cognitive skills, such as literacy and numeracy, were measured using data from the OECD’s Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) survey in 2012 and 2015. Data showed that teacher cognitive skills vary across countries. For example, teachers in the US perform worse than the average teacher in numeracy, while their literacy skills were “slightly better than average”.Meanwhile, the report noted that: “These differences in teacher cognitive skills reflect both where teachers are drawn from within each country’s skill distribution and where a country’s overall cognitive-skill level falls in the world distribution.”