Education researchers and policymakers agree that teachers differ in terms of
quality and that quality matters for student achievement. Despite prodigious amounts of
research, however, debate still persists about the causal relationship between specific
teacher credentials and student achievement. In this paper, we use a rich administrative
data set from North Carolina to explore a range of questions related to the relationship
between teacher characteristics and credentials on the one hand and student achievement
on the other. Though the basic questions underlying this research are not new -- and,
indeed, have been explored in many papers over the years within the rubric of the
“education production function” -- the availability of data on all teachers and students in
North Carolina over a ten-year period allows us to explore them in more detail and with
far more confidence than has been possible in previous studies. We conclude that a
teacher’s experience, test scores and regular licensure all have positive effects on student
achievement, with larger effects for math than for reading. Taken together the various
teacher credentials exhibit quite large effects on math achievement, whether compared to
the effects of changes in class size or to the socio-economics characteristics of students,
as measured, for example, by the education level of their parents