Research has shown time and again that experience matters in good teaching. What it hasn’t shown is that every experience matters equally. In fact, a teacher’s first few years on the job are by far the most important, and it has been demonstrated repeatedly that the vast majority of teaching improvement comes in the first few years on the job.
Unfortunately, districts have yet to utilize this research in any way. Instead, they set arbitrary teacher salary schedules that are based purely on a teacher’s years of experience and education credentials. They mostly do not reflect actual teacher performance year-to-year, but they don’t even take into consideration the career paths of the typical teacher.
To show what this looks like, I’ve graphed teacher salaries in four DC-area suburban districts (Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland and Fairfax and Prince William Counties in Virginia) with average teacher effectiveness scores in mathematics. The effectiveness scores are value-added measures that compute a teacher’s ability to maintain or increase student scores on standardized tests of achievement. They are graphed according to differences from the average teacher, and they come from a recent paper which found effectiveness scores in line with prior research.
The maroon bars represent salaries for fully certified teachers with bachelor’s degrees only, and the blue bars are average salaries for fully certified teachers with Master’s degrees only. As the chart shows, salaries in these four districts increases almost linearly, although they grow much faster after teachers have 14 or 17 years of experience than when they have only a few.
