Teacher experience and student achievement

Discussions of merit pay invariably bring up the question of whether teachers should be paid according to experience and level of educational attainment (i. e., degrees earned).

Part of the reason for paying teachers this way is certainly market based. Teachers who have entered the second half of their teaching career need to see regular increases or else they would be more likely to seek more lucrative careers in other fields. Teachers with long histories within their district are valuable, and high turnover coupled with a lack of veterans certainly wouldn't be good for any school or district.

The other reason teachers earn more based on experience is that, well, intuitively we would think, and hope, that more experienced teachers are better at what they do and there would be increased student achievement as a result.

Now there appears to be some new evidence that experience in the classroom leads to achievement gains. I would caution readers, of course, that any kind of educational research should be taken with a grain of salt: sorting out the various factors that make up student achievement and isolating them from other facts so that they can be measured... well it's an arduous task. I'm speaking not as a researcher, but as someone who's read and studied a lot of such research. Sometimes it seems that you can find educational research both for and against nearly every educational practice one might want to investigate.

So, with that caveat in place, the study out of Washington suggests that there are marked increases in achievement associated with the first few years of teaching--no surprise there--then levelling off.

Teacher experience, and not advanced degrees, has a greater effect on how well students succeed, a new state report says.

"In the first few years on the job, a teacher gains considerably in her or his ability to improve the academic performance of students," said the report, issued Sunday by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy.

Combining the results of 15 studies on teacher pay, the researchers found a dramatic improvement in student achievement between one and five years of teacher experience and a more gradual boost in the years following. Student achievement in these studies was mostly tracked through scores on standardized reading or math tests.

A similar analysis of studies concerning teachers getting graduate degrees found that the degrees seemed to have little or no effect on student outcomes.

The report makes a preliminary recommendation that any changes in the way teachers are paid should emphasize financial rewards for experience rather than higher pay for teachers with graduate degrees.

Now, I'm skeptical of the last part... I'll never believe that advanced degrees don't lead to gains in teaching performance. But nonetheless, that's the study; take it for what it's worth.

You won't find any argument from members of the teaching profession that growth occurs rapidly in the first few years of teaching. It takes at least five years, and sometimes more, to get organized, and to learn what really works in the classroom, what keeps students engaged and what doesn't, how to weed out the ineffective parts of your instruction and keep the better parts. Then there's just the struggle with classroom management which may take a few years to learn.

After those first five years, good teachers still make a lot of room for growth. I know that some of the best adjustments I made as a teacher occurred in my last couple of years, after I already had ten years of experience. I'd be interested also to see if there is a study--and there probably is, somewhere--of student achievement when teachers hold a Master's degree in their subject area (not an education degree). I always felt that my content area Master's degree was critical for my teaching, especially as I taught upper level high school courses, where content area command is most critical.