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Readers may remember a post I wrote about an important study last month: New Study Suggests That A Teacher’s Impact On Student Behavior More Important Than Test Scores.

It discussed new research by Kirabo Jackson.

I did have one question about the research, and posed it to Kirabo:

How were you able to identify which teacher was responsible for non-cognitive gains? In other words, it’s obvious that math teachers would impact math scores and English teachers would affect English scores. But how were you able to do the same with non-cognitive skills? It would seem to me that, for example, if an English teacher was an effective teacher of non-cognitive skills, that those skills would also be applied by students in their other classes. So how could you be sure it was the English teacher who was effective in the non-cognitive arena and it was not attributable to the math teacher?

He got back to me immediately, and sent me a link to this tweet (that I missed) he had sent out this weekend answering that question:

He also added:

I would add this “one of the key results is that using this approach, teachers who tend to raise attendance historically also tend do to do so contemporaneously. If all teacher got “blamed” for the absence then this would not be the case.”

Thanks, Kirabo!