On Teachers and Education

Greg Mankiw passes on an estimate of the value added by a teacher who's one standard deviation better than the average: $400,000 for a class of 20.  Meanwhile, a comparison of the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) scores by discipline puts elementary educators 5 rungs from the bottom, with secondary and higher education above, but still below average.  (Public administration was just above elementary education, but I was happy to see, as a failed historian, history was third from the top--all rankings based on verbal scores.)