Good or Bad, Teachers Can Skew Your Lifetime Earnings

Remember the best teacher you had in grade school? According to a new study, that teacher might well have increased the lifetime income of you and your classmates by $400,000. Remember the worst teacher? That teacher could have diminished the classes' lifetime earnings by the same amount.

A paper by researcher Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University attempts to place a cash value on the impact of good and bad teachers in schools. Why? In part because he found that other ways that teachers are measured and rewarded seem to have little correlation to student achievement.