A Good Kindergarten Teacher Is Worth $320,000 Per Year

Wiese, Brent. Class Adventure. Digital image. SunGecko. 17 May 2007. Web. 3 Oct. 2011.

What's a good teacher worth?

We've always known that teachers, especially kindergarten and early childhood ed teachers, were not paid what they were really worth, to their kids and society at large -- but we still probably underestimated the worth of a good teacher.

A 'standout' kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 per year if you add up the lifetime benefits for her students.


This is according to a 2010 study, by Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, who looked at adult outcomes like education, earnings, single parenthood, and even saving for retirement, to measure how much a good teacher does for her students, to say nothing of the society at large.

You can read the whole New York Times article, "The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers," or read Chetty's findings, as he presented them at an academic conference.

My favorite line of Chetty's in the article is: "We don’t really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes." Which I love to hear out loud -- though his study also reveals that test scores are good predictors of some of the outcomes we care about most.

Because of the law of diminishing returns, I expect that we high school teachers aren't worth quite that much to our kids, but I bet we're still worth more, even on a merely economic level, than our country -- and certainly our state -- is willing to pay right now.

That's to say nothing of all the other effects a good teacher has. How do we price those?