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doesn’t this issue get more attention? “First,” answers Hanushek, “it is likely that ineffective teachers are generally hidden, in the sense that few kids get a string of bad teachers. Principals know very well who the ineffective teachers are, so they can balance a bad teacher one year with a good teacher the next. This implicit averaging process also means that it does not look like schools can do much to alter family background and what the child brings to school. Second, parents do not quite know how to interpret results on achievement tests. The teachers’ unions have, since the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, conducted a campaign to convince people that these scores do not really matter very much. Here they are flatly contradicted by the evidence.”

Achievement in school matters, and it matters for a lifetime. “Somebody who graduates at the 85th percentile on the achievement distribution can be expected to earn 13 percent to 20 percent more than the average student,” writes Hanushek. “This applies every year throughout a person’s working life, yielding a difference in present value of earnings of $150,000 to $230,000 on average … By conservative estimates, the teacher in the top 15 percent of quality can, in one year, add more than $20,000 to a student’s lifetime earnings, my research found … For a class of 20 students, we see that this very good teacher is adding some $400,000 in value to the economy each year.” A bad teacher in the bottom 15 percent is subtracting the same amount.

What are the best school systems in the world doing to attract and retain the best teachers and principals, and how do we introduce similar reforms here? To answer the question, McKinsey produced a study entitled How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top (September 2007). It looked at the world’s ten best-performing school systems, such as Finland’s and Singapore’s, and compared them to less accomplished ones. The study’s key findings are these: Most people who become teachers in these successful countries come from among the top 10 percent of their high school or college graduating classes; university students see the teaching profession as one of the top three career choices; the ratio of applications to available places in initial teacher-education courses in these countries is roughly ten to one; starting salaries for teachers in the successful countries are in line with other graduate salaries; teachers in these successful countries spend about 10 percent of their time on professional development—far higher than in America—and these same teachers regularly invite one another into their classrooms to observe and coach; finally, there are clear standards for what students should know, should understand, and should be able to do at each grade level.

The report’s conclusions: The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of the teachers. The only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction. Achieving universally high outcomes is only possible by putting in place mechanisms to ensure that schools deliver high-quality instruction to every child.

The McKinsey report did not evaluate principals, but they, too, are vitally important to student achievement. And finding ways to evaluate principals has to be part of any educational reform program. A principal’s ability to recruit and retain great teachers, improve the effectiveness of all teachers, and, most important, to serve as an inspirational leader to bring out the best in teachers and students must be part of any evaluation process for any school system. As any teacher can tell you, the difference that a good or bad principal can make for an entire school is enormous. Tony Wagner, the Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, argues that America should create a West Point for would-be teachers and principals: “We need a new National Education Academy, modeled after our military academies, to raise the status of the profession and to support the R and D that is essential for reinventing