Eric Hanushek on what test scores indicate about teacher effectiveness and national growth, and more

Eric Hanushek, Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, discusses his significant contributions to educational policy, his work on the economic returns to educational quality, the impact of No Child Left Behind, and how teacher effectiveness is best measured by student outcomes. 

In this episode, Hanushek and Ashenfelter discuss:

• Hanushek’s education at the Air Force Academy–where he was a member of the institution’s seventh graduating class–and his later graduate studies at MIT. 
• His dissertation on the Coleman Report, the U.S. government’s major study of equality of educational opportunity. “Nobody had any idea what it was all about… I eventually got the data… and wrote a dissertation on it. I was one of the first people there to write a serious quantitative analysis clearly of education.”
• His research on the effectiveness of teachers in schools. “...that work has led to 40 out of the 50 states [that] now want teachers to be evaluated on their value added to students, basically on the test scores of their students. But at the time, nobody thought that you should measure the performance of teachers by what students learned.”
• His study on the effectiveness of educational funding. “The money matters debate is not that money doesn't have an influence on schools. It's whether money is used effectively.”  
• Hanushek’s work on how education quality impacts a nation's labor force and economic growth rates. He argued that schooling amount was not a good indicator of whether a country succeeded in increasing its growth rate. “...that's because they went to pretty crummy schools…. if you just measured whether they learned something, it turns out that that was a much better indicator of future productivity of the labor force.” 
• His thoughts on the effectiveness of No Child Left Behind and his research on how learning losses in the US began well before COVID.
• His study comparing the language learning skills in countries that dub versus subtitle films. “...dubbing countries do much better in math than they do in English, where in relative terms, subtitling countries do much better in English than they do in math.” 

Eric Hanushek earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 1968. He is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is internationally recognized for his economic analysis of educational issues in modern and developing countries,and was awarded the 2021 Yidan Prize for Education Research."The Work Goes On"—a podcast produced by Princeton's Industrial Relations Section (IR Section)—is an oral history of industrial relations and labor economics hosted by Princeton's Orley Ashenfelter.