Inaugural Broad Seminar Connects Education Scholars with Public School Leaders

Teacher quality is one of the most important factors determining the course of a student’s education. Yet not all schools are employing the most effective strategies for hiring and retaining high-quality teachers, and educational talent is distributed inequitably in the United States, with teachers tending to start their careers in low-income districts and move to wealthier ones as they become more experienced and effective.

Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the University of Washington, discussed research-based solutions to this problem on October 10 during the inaugural Broad Seminar, a new annual event that will bring distinguished education scholars to campus to discuss their work. The seminar is an initiative of The Broad Center at Yale SOM, which fosters the ideas, collaboration, and leadership to help all students—particularly those from underserved communities—to learn and thrive. The Broad Center supports leaders in large, urban public school systems through its signature leadership development programs, the Master’s in Public Education Management and the Fellowship in Public Education Leadership.

Hanseul Kang, assistant dean and executive director of The Broad Center, said that the seminar series will advance the center’s mission by connecting “practitioners, policy makers, researchers, and all the different kinds of people who care about making our school systems as effective possible for our students.”

Goldhaber began his talk by quantifying the impact of high-quality teachers on students’ post-secondary careers. “If you were able to replace teachers at the very bottom of the value-added distribution, and replace them with an average teacher, the present discounted value of lifetime earnings is about $250,000 per classroom,” he said. “All of this suggests that teacher quality is really, really important.”

Goldhaber said that school systems can use his findings to help identify and retain high-quality educators. He noted that Yale SOM faculty member Barbara Biasi’s research on flexible pay structures for teachers provides a replicable blueprint for school systems to reward excellence among teachers.

The seminar, which was open to the entire Yale community, was the culmination of Goldhaber’s weeklong visit to New Haven, which also included a lecture for faculty and graduate students in the economics department through the Labor/Public Economics Workshop and a small-group conversation with members of The Broad Center’s Fellowship cohort.

Researchers and school districts often struggle to connect the kind of quantitative research he conducts to decision-making processes, Goldhaber said. “The biggest barrier is that there is oftentimes a real disconnect between researchers and school systems. A lot of the world works through trusted relationships, and you want those relationships to exist between people who are running the schools day-to-day and education researchers.”

With initiatives like the new seminar series, Kang said, The Broad Center is working to address that disconnect, both by connecting researchers to practitioners as they decide which problems to investigate and distilling findings so that school leaders can “access the most relevant points and actionable items.”

“We want to make sure that the research we’re supporting at The Broad Center is not only top-quality for its field and discipline, but also yields practical findings for practitioners,” Kang said.

The Broad Fellows who attended the talk were eager to bring those practical findings back to their schools. “Hearing about the data that impacts students in terms of the teachers that we put in classrooms was eye-opening,” said Nicole Scott, chief of legal, compliance, and external partners at Phalen Leadership Academies. “I want to review this information more closely with my team.”