Eric Hanushek

Hanushek's analyses of teacher value-added and of the impact of teacher effectiveness on economic outcomes of students were central to the California court case of Vergara v. California, a case in which he subsequently testified for the plaintiffs. That court case challenged the constitutionality of the teacher tenure and the teacher dismissal statutes in California. In June 2014 Judge Ralph M. Treu issued his ruling in the case, finding that the statutes in question were unconstitutional. This ruling was subsequently appealed by the California Teachers Association and by Governor Jerry Brown. A follow-on suit was filed in New York State.

In addition to measuring teachers, Hanushek has also applied his outcome-based approach to measuring the effectiveness of school principals, whom he states also greatly impact student achievement – through their role in selecting and retaining good teachers. This research appeared as working paper "Estimating the effects of leaders on public sector productivity. The case of school principals", published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (2012). The same authors also issued a more general article, "School Leaders Matter", explaining their conclusions in the Hoover Institute magazine Education Next 13: 1 (Winter 2013). In a review, Margaret Terry Orr agreed that principals can have positive effects but she questioned whether value added methods could ever adequately measure their performance, faulting the authors for using "sloppy terminology" and ignoring "a large body of research."

In 2011 Hanushek was the central expert witness for the defense in the highly publicized case of Lobato vs. State of Colorado, named for Taylor Lobato, who in 2005 was a middle-school student when her parents filed a suit that claimed her San Luis Valley school district was underfunded compared to wealthier districts. In that case, Denver District Judge Sheila Rappaport issued a 189-page decision rejecting the state's arguments, writing that: "Dr. Hanushek’s analysis that there is not much relationship in Colorado between spending and achievement contradicts testimony and documentary evidence from dozens of well-respected educators in the State, defies logic, and is statistically flawed." In 2013, the Colorado Supreme Court reversed Judge Rappaport's opinion and overturned the lower court's opinion in its entirety.

In 2011, a United States National Research Council panel issued a report that concluded that empirical results do not support the use of such test-based accountability policies such as the No Child Left Behind Act and high school exit exams. The report concluded that such incentives, which now have been in place for many years, at best have succeeded in raising scores only minutely in the earliest grades and then only in math. The panel also reported that high school exit exams serve only to increase the dropout rate and have no effect on scores. Hanushek responded in the pages of Education Next (published by the Hoover Institution), accusing the panel of "bias" and calling its evidence of poor or non-existent educational improvement "weak". Since then arguments about test-based incentives and school exit exams has intensified. The re-authorization of the No Child Left Behind Act and plans for expansion of high school exit examinations now hinge on the outcome of these debates.

Hanushek's approach underlies the development of "value-added assessment" methods of teacher effectiveness, which uses statistical analysis of student achievement information (as measured by pupil scores) to evaluate teacher performance. When applied in teacher personnel decisions, value added assessment has been highly controversial. In 2010, the value added rankings for more than 6,000 teachers were published in the Los Angeles Times, resulting in complaints by teachers and their unions that they were being subjected to public shaming. The New York Times also subsequently published such measures for their local teachers. Nonetheless, a significant number of states now require that teacher evaluations include consideration of student achievement and in some cases require the use of value added measures.

Hanushek is a member of the Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, whose members, including Caroline M. Hoxby and Paul E. Peterson, support school accountability, teacher incentives, and charter schools and vouchers. Hanushek was a presidential appointee to the Board of Directors of the National Board for Education Sciences that approves the research priorities of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences and was the Board chair from 2008 to 2010. From 2011 to 2013, he served on the Equity and Excellence Commission of the U.S. Department of Education. He is a research professor at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research (University of Munich) and is the area coordinator for Economics of Education, CESifo Research Network. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). In the U.S. federal government, Hanushek has served as deputy director of the Congressional Budget Office, senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, and senior economist for the Cost of Living Council. At the state level, he has been appointed to state education advisory commissions by the governor of California and of Texas.

Hanushek was the recipient of an award for scholarship from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (a think tank) in 2004.

Hanushek's other claim, that class size has no consistent effect on educational performance, is vehemently disputed by Alan Krueger, among others. The debate is summed up in Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein (eds.) The class size debate (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2002). See also the peer-reviewed assessment of the evidence in Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Dominic J. Brewer, Adam Gamoran, and J. Douglas Willms, "Class size and student achievement." Psychological Science in the Public Interest 2, no. 1 (May 2001) 1–30

His 1986 paper, "The Economics of Schooling", reported finding an inconsistent relationship between school resources and student outcomes. It provoked numerous responses. For this reason he is associated, especially by his detractors, with the slogan "money doesn't matter". One critic, Larry Hedges, used meta-analysis of Hanushek's own figures to contend that $100 spent per pupil (1989 dollars) would in fact raise student achievement by one-fifth of a standard deviation. Between 1990 and 2010, however, spending per pupil adjusted for inflation rose by $3500, while reading scores of 17-year-olds actually fell. Hanushek responded to critics in "Money might matter somewhere." Hanushek maintains that how money is spent is more important than how much money is spent, now a commonly accepted interpretation of the data. He suggests that money allocated ought to be spent implementing the policies with proven efficacy, such as replacing teachers who fail to raise test scores and closing schools which persistently fail to produce reasonable student achievement. Citing with approval Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, he argues that court decisions over funding adequacy, may create a policy ‘window’ in which "judicial cover is provided for legislative activities and a variety of remedies are put forward. These ‘windows’ have been mainly used to push through higher funding, but there is no reason that court decisions could not also open a ‘window’ during which other reforms, such as those discussed in this book, might also be enacted."

Hanushek advocates using economic analysis to improve student performance. He has authored numerous, highly cited articles on the effects of class size reduction, high-stakes accountability, teacher effectiveness, and other education related topics. In a 1971 paper he introduced the concept of evaluating teacher effectiveness on the basis of student learning gains. This idea is the basis of value-added assessments of teacher quality. In his most recent book, The Knowledge Capital of Nations, Hanushek concludes that the quality of education is causally related to economic growth.

Princeton University economist Jesse M. Rothstein has described the use of value-added measurement for evaluating teacher performance, recommended by Hanushek as early as 1971, as conceptually deeply flawed, since value-added scores assume that students are randomly assigned to teachers, whereas in the real world it is almost never the case for students to be randomly assigned to teachers or schools. "Non-random assignment of students to teachers can bias value-added estimates of teachers’ causal effects," Rothstein writes. Daniel F. McCaffrey and Thomas Kane of the Measures of Effective Teaching Project of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had published studies supportive of Hanushek's contentions, as have Raj Chetty (William Henry Bloomberg Professor of Economics at Harvard) et al.

Since the early 1970s, when plaintiffs have filed lawsuits seeking to overthrow school funding based on local property taxes as inequitable, Hanushek has been called to testify as an expert witness in defense of the state. He testifies that the problem with schools is not so much lack of funds as inefficiency and asserts that increasing (or seeking to equalize) appropriations can be wasteful, since his analyses show that more funding produces inconsistent outcomes. Instead of seeking to equalize funding among districts, Hanushek recommends introducing value-added testing to identify and remove underperforming teachers, greater accountability, and vouchers and charter schools to introduce market-based parental choice. He labels those who oppose these measures as wanting to protect special interests and sacred cows and accuses them of wanting to maintain the status quo. In particular, Hanushek identifies teachers' unions among the entrenched or special interests that oppose the measures he recommends. The 20 school funding trials at which Hanushek has testified over the years include Serrano v. Priest (1973) in California, Somerset County Board of Education v Hornbeck in Maryland (1980), and Abbott v. Burke (1987) in New Jersey. His amicus brief was cited in the 2009 five-to-four U.S. Supreme Court decision of Horne v. Flores. Citing Hanushek and Lindseth in a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court held that in evaluating the actions of the state, attention should focus on student outcomes rather than on inequalities of spending and other inputs to schools.

Hanushek received a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Air Force Academy in 1965 and a PhD in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1961 to 1974. Hanushek held teaching positions at the U.S. Air Force Academy (1968–73) and at Yale University (1975–78) and was named professor of economics and public policy at the University of Rochester from 1978 to 2000.

In contrast to James Coleman, who in the 1960s had suggested that schools and teachers had little effect on student performance, Hanushek introduced the idea of judging teacher effectiveness based on the learning gains of students. Hanushek's 1992 study of inner-city children showed that disadvantaged pupils taught by good teachers gained one-and one-half years of learning, as opposed to only six months when taught by poor teachers – that is, a difference of a full school year. This finding he maintained had highly significant policy implications.

Eric Alan Hanushek (/ˈhænəʃɛk/; born May 22, 1943) is an economist who has written prolifically on public policy with a special emphasis on the economics of education. Since 2000, he has been a Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an American public policy think tank located at Stanford University in California. He was awarded the Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2021.