>Education and Intelligence: Pity the Poor Teacher because Student Characteristics are more Significant than Teachers or Schools (2016)

Education has not changed from the beginning of recorded history. The problem is that focus has been on

schools and teachers and not students. Here is a simple thought experiment with two conditions: 1) 50 teachers are

assigned by their teaching quality to randomly composed classes of 20 students, 2) 50 classes of 20 each are composed

by selecting the most able students to fill each class in order and teachers are assigned randomly to classes. In condition

1, teaching ability of each teacher and in condition 2, mean ability level of students in each class is correlated with

average gain over the course of instruction. Educational gain will be best predicted by student abilities (up to r = 0.95)

and much less by teachers’ skill (up to r = 0.32). I argue that seemingly immutable education will not change until we

fully understand students and particularly human intelligence. Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence

has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the

remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance

at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with

learning gains. This evidence is reviewed.