Although child effects accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in teacher effort that we observed, we also found considerable variation in teacher effort toward individual children that could not be attributed to a child effect. Common environmental factors influenced required teacher effort among children in the same classroom, but not among children in different classrooms. The common-environment variance component in behavior-genetic models is usually thought to index environmental experiences in children’s families that have made the children similar. In our study, shared environmental factors created similarities in teacher’s effort between children in the same classroom, but not between children in different classrooms. There are three possible explanations for this finding: First, a shared classroom climate may result in pupils who require similar teaching effort, irrespective of their genetic backgrounds. Second, teachers’ individual styles may lead them to invest similar amounts of effort in all pupils in their classrooms. Third, ratings provided by the same teacher may contain bias and create artificial similarities among pupils.Further work examining possible connections among classroom climate, teachers, and teacher effort is needed to determine which of these factors is the most likely explanation for our finding.