Head of Washington D.C. Schools Stresses the Importance of Good Teaching

Here's an excerpt from an article appearing in Time Magazine (December 8, 2008) about the impact that good and poor teachers have on students:
If two average 8-year-olds are assigned to different teachers, one who is strong and one who is weak, the children's lives can diverge in just a few years, according to research pioneered by Eric Hanushek at Stanford. The child with the effective teacher, the kind who ranks among the top 15% of all teachers, will be scoring well above grade level on standardized tests by the time she is 11. The other child will be a year and a half below grade level--and by then it will take a teacher who works with the child after school and on weekends to undo the compounded damage. In other words, the child will probably never catch up.

This is the link to the full text of the article this excerpt comes from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1862444,00.html