New Studies Find That, for Teachers, Experience Really Does Matter
Studies Cite Gains by Veterans
The notion that teachers improve over their first three or so years in the classroom and plateau thereafter is deeply ingrained in K-12 policy discussions, coming up in debate after debate about pay, professional development, and teacher seniority, among other topics.
But findings from a handful of recently released studies are raising questions about that proposition. In fact, they suggest the average teacher's ability to boost student achievement increases for at least the first decade of his or her career—and likely longer.
Moreover, teachers' deepening experience appears to translate into other student benefits as well. One of the new studies, for example, links years on the job to declining rates of student absenteeism.
Although the studies raise numerous questions for follow-up, the researchers say it may be time to retire the received—and somewhat counterintuitive—wisdom that teachers can't or don't improve much after their first few years on the job.
"For some reason, you hear this all the time, from all sorts of people, Bill Gates on down," said John P. Papay, an assistant professor of education and economics at Brown University, in Providence, R.I. He is the co-author of one of two new studies on the topic. "But teacher quality is not something that's fixed. It does develop, and if you're making a decision about a teacher's career, you should be looking at that dynamic."
Better With Age
Investigating the connection between a teacher's experience and his or her teaching quality has long proved methodologically challenging, largely because of the difficulty in comparing cohorts of students taught by teachers of varied experience levels with different training and backgrounds. Studies based on such cross-sectional comparisons have tended to find few performance differences between early- and later-career teachers.
Beginning in the early 2000s, scholars began to track the same teachers over time, linking them to their students' test scores. But there are pitfalls to that type of statistical modeling, too. For one, it requires researchers to make assumptions about a typical teacher's growth trajectory over time in order to disentangle the effects of each year of experience from other possible influences, such as a change in class size or curriculum New Studies Find That, for Teachers, Experience Really Does Matter - Education Week:
