"A good school is not necessarily the one that spends the most. A good teacher is not necessarily the one who has a master's degree or has the most experience. We found there are big differences across schools and they are not closely related to our common ways of judging the quality of schools."

Our interview with Dr. Hanushek explores his pioneering research into the correlations between attributes of student learning and achievement and attributes of schools, teachers, and teaching quality.

"It is not that somebody knows the current science, because the current science might be wrong, but it is that somebody knows how to learn about new science .... how to learn to do something they never thought about doing when they were in school. That is the key element".

Eric A. Hanushek, Ph.D. is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. One of the nation's leading educational economists, he is also the chairman of the Executive Committee for the Texas Schools Project, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education.

"If students aren't prepared in their reading and comprehension abilities, they fall back in all areas".