A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Teacher Selection

The purpose of this article is to report some results of applying cost-effectiveness analytic techniques to decisions on teacher recruitment and retention. The data are derived from the U.S. Office of Education's Survey of Equal Opportunity for the school year 1965-66. Evidence relating teacher characteristics to student achievement is combined with data on the costs of obtaining teachers with different characteristics. This evaluation suggests that recruiting and retaining teachers with higher verbal scores is five to ten times as effective per dollar of teacher expenditure in raising achievement scores of students as the strategy of obtaining teachers with more experience. Separate estimates are made for black and for white sixth graders in schools of the metropolitan North.