It's only bold because there is a large number of people (often state founded, often controlling at least the lower levels of education, often with major influence on media) who strongly feel otherwise -- with no numbers to back them up, of course.

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If you actually do want to get to the bottom of it, I can heartily recommend Ian Deary's "Intelligence: A Short Introduction" as a place to start.

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-A-Very-Short-Introduction...

(Who knows, if you dig around a bit you might even be able to find a PDF, perhaps at Emil Kirkegaard's website.)

You can also choose to spend an hour on this talk by Stephen Hsu who does research on IQ and genetics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jZENi1ed8

You can read some of Plomin's stuff -- he is very much into genetics:

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v20/n1/full/mp2014105a.html

There's a paper I can't find at the moment that looks at almost 4000 non-related people, give them an IQ test each + scan their DNA for typical SNPs with a DNA chip. That gives us almost 8,000,000 pairs where we know how similar their IQ score and DNA was. That gives us almost 8,000,000 points we can plot into a 2D coordinate system (and we can of course also throw statistics at them). It turns out that there is a clear correlation between measured IQ and measured SNPs (i.e., the point cloud is denser along a line). In other words, there is a statistical relation between DNA and IQ. This is a result that is extremely hard to explain away if one believes in nurture, SES, microaggressions, racism, ESL difficulties, etc.

Since it is such a rhetorically important paper, I hope somebody else can chime in with a proper citation (I can also swear that even though I downloaded it at a university library, it has somehow also ended up somewhere in the neighbourhood of Emil Kirkegaard).

This paper only gives us points at the lower end of IQ/DNA similarity, of course. We already have numbers at the higher end where we know that the points still fit -- but it was possible to explain it away with nurture, SES, and all that. There has been a longer chain of arguments for about a hundred years that counteracted that (adoption studies, parents who die when their children are young or unborn, divorce and remarriage, etc.) -- but since it was longer, it was easy to ignore.

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Ian Deary runs the Lothian Birth Cohort study which is really interesting if you are at all interested in how people's outcome in life differ and why (and to what degree it can be predicted and bad outcomes be prevented).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Deary#Lothian_Birth_Cohort...

http://www.lothianbirthcohort.ed.ac.uk/

The "Newsletters" links in the sidebar gives you access to PDF's for the newsletters they send to the participants in the studies (and their relatives/caretakers). They are very easy to read/skim compared to normal research papers.

Definitely well worth reading if you are at all interested in education, intelligence, and outcomes (especially if you don't really believe in intelligence yet, i.e. if you are a flat-earther/creationist/timecubist).

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Bloggers:

http://www.drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/

http://infoproc.blogspot.dk/

http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/

All three do active research on intelligence (Emil mostly in the form of contributing statistical know-how).

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There's a lot more but this is what I'm going to dig up for now. You are basically asking me to find a short text using small words that is on the internet and tailored to precisely your beliefs (false or true), precisely your background knowledge, that describes thousands of well-done studies apparently without difficult maths and lots of numbers AND that is "reputable" in "an area of controversy", which means you give yourself permission to dismiss anything if whomever you choose to hold in authority doesn't like it. That's a tall order, especially since there are so many dimwits within education "research" who believe false things and who can't do statistics.

A more forthcoming query from you that 1) showed that you had done your homework (you clearly haven't), 2) told me what you know and don't know, and 3) told me which precise points you don't understand or aren't yet willing to believe would -- naturally -- have produced a more useful answer from me.

I can tell, though, that a degree in education doesn't seem to make a difference in the efficacy of the teacher. But their IQ does. The IQ of the students matter, too. The discipline and noise level in the class also matters. It certainly also matters that the teacher knows the subject he or she is teaching. There is also a correlation between how long a teacher has taught and how well he or she teaches -- probably a combination of a selection effect and a training effect but I don't think anybody yet knows how much each matters.