Parents prefer popular (rather than demanding) teachers

David Francis reports on a recent NBER working paper by Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren: What Do Parents Value in Education?:

...It seems that, on average, parents strongly prefer teachers whom principals describe as the most popular with students - that is, those who are good at promoting student satisfaction. In contrast, parents place relatively less value on a teacher's ability to raise standardized mathematics or reading achievement scores...

However, the conclusion really depends on income levels.  More affluent parents appear to place more emphasis on student satisfaction, less affluent parents value achievement relatively more highly:

However, the average preference masks striking differences across family demographics. Families with children in higher poverty and minority schools in the district strongly value student achievement. When they make requests, they are more likely to pick teachers who provide high "value-added" in terms of student achievement scores and teachers whom the principal rates highly in terms of factors such as organization, classroom management, and enhancing student achievement. However, these parents were essentially indifferent to the principal's report of a teacher's ability to promote student satisfaction. Interestingly, the results are exactly reversed for families in higher-income schools. These parents are most likely to request teachers whom the principal describes as "a good role model" and/or good at promoting student satisfaction. They do not choose teachers who provide high "value-added" in terms of student achievement, or who receive high scores in this area from their principal.

Are families with higher incomes consuming larger quantities of a good (child happiness) as their incomes increase, or is the marginal value of an academic edge relatively smaller for these families:

The authors suggest several potential explanations for this finding. First, they note that education should be viewed as a consumption good as well as an investment good, and that it is possible that wealthier parents simply place a higher premium on the consumption value of schooling. Second, the authors note that these findings are consistent with a declining marginal utility of achievement on the part of parents. In other words, wealthier parents may believe that their children already have something of a head start in basic reading and math skills, so they value a strictly achievement-oriented teacher less highly than more disadvantaged parents whose children may not have these basic skills...

What Do Parents Value in Education? (Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren, NBER Working Paper No. 11494, July, 2005)

Comments

[Andromeda Yelton]

I don't know that you can draw anything interesting from this.

I teach at a private school which is predominantly frequented by wealthy parents. And, yes, I see parents talking warmly of teachers who are beloved by the students. But I also see that most of my coworkers are excellent teachers. Kids in every classroom are learning -- and they're learning a lot relative to what they would learn in most schools. In other words, parents don't need to focus on the quality of individual teachers because that's already been guaranteed by their tuition dollars. They get to discriminate along this less important axis now.

The link explicitly says that they're comparing -- not more or less wealthy parents within the same school -- but parents in *schools* of greater or lesser wealth. I hazard that these greater-wealth schools are attracting higher-quality teachers (due to better funding, working conditions, and prestige). Parents at these schools are reassured about teacher quality, so they prioritize other things.

In fact, I might even expect that higher-wealth parents have already tacitly expressed their preferences for teacher quality via either buying a house in an expensive school district, or spending money on private education (isn't this, after all, how people with money express educational quality preferences?). Having satisfied this implicitly, they then express preferences along other axes within this framework. People who haven't had the money to satisfy their quality preference are left to seek it by selecting teachers within the schools they can afford.

To do a real comparison you'd have to look at parents' preferences for teachers within the same school.

[John]

Couldn't it be held true that students who enjoy learning more will attempt to achieve more? There may be less "value added" in the short term when comparing test scores, but I would think that those students who are happy at school would be more apt to apply to colleges and graduate degrees because they associate good feelings with school. Those students who are disciplined more harshly may look forward to the end of their schooling.