The following was written by Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute, located in Washington, D.C. This post originally appeared on the institute’s blog.
"Even those who think the magnitude of these returns is not commensurate with the role of experience in education policy cannot dispute that it is still a proven signal of quality, at least during the early years of teachers’ careers. And it is virtually certain that teachers also improve in other ways that don’t show up in their students’ test scores.
So, unless we are going to design employment policies based strictly on test scores (which is both ridiculous and logistically impossible), we might recalibrate these policies to exploit the findings above, including using other measures along with experience, restructuring salary schedules, keeping teachers in the same grade over multiple years, or paying more attention to the important role of peers in shaping teachers’ learning curves."
Continue Reading the Full Article:
On the Shanker Institute Blog: The Teaching Experience
On Valerie Strauss’ "Answer Sheet” in the Washington Post: The Teacher Experience
