Why teaching experience really matters
Bill Gates, who appears to be running for shadow education secretary,just urged states and school districts to pay teachers according to “value-added based” merit systems that inevitably use standardized test scores to judge how well a teacher is doing, despite criticisms that there is no evidence such systems work.
Experience in teaching doesn’t matter much, nor do advanced education degrees, Gates said in a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers' annual policy forum in Louisville on Friday.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan made the same argument about advanced education degrees two days earlier in a speech, and many times previously had backed eliminating experience as a criterion for judging and compensating teachers.
(In their speeches this week, both men called for districts to consider raising class size. A coincidence, no doubt.)
Actually, experience in the classroom does matter.
The following was written by Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute, located in Washington, D.C. This post
