Not Exactly

Fred Hiatt sat down with Bill Gates to talk education reform, producing a pretty straightforward reformist summary in the Post yesterday. One point, however, deserves clarification. Hiatt said:

In fact, Gates said, evidence shows no connection between teaching quality and most of the measures used in contracts to determine pay. Seniority, holding a master's degree or teacher's certification, and even, below 10th grade, having deep knowledge of a subject -- these all are mostly irrelevant.

A lot depends on what you mean by "mostly," I suppose, but you really can't characterize each of those factors in exactly the same way. Holding a master's degree has been proven to be pretty definitively irrelevant; this is one of the most consistent findings in the research and really quite shocking when you think about it. The effect of certification is a little tricky to measure because the vast majority of all teachers are certified and those who aren't tend to differ from the general population in specific ways, positive (TFA) and negative (the district needed a body in the classroom and literally hired someone off the street.) Master's degrees, by contrast, split about 50/50. They are an advanced postseconary credential in education granted by an accredited institution of higher learning and yet when you control for other factors they have no impact on classroom effectiveness, as measured by student learning gains, at all. This is one of those public policy scandals that's so big and ubiquitous and long-standing that it's hard to see, becuase it's everywhere. 

Experience, by contrast--that is, "seniority"--really does make a big difference in the early years of teachers' careers. Nearly everyone is a lot better after five years in the classroom than they are right out of the box. Then effectiveness flattens out and actually declines near the end of teachers' careers. Of course it's true that some first-year teachers, while much worse than their future fifth-year selves, are still better than the current fifth-year selves of other teachers. But still, we shouldn't lose sight of seniority--low-income, low-performing and minority students tend to be disproportionately assigned to rookie teachers with terrible consequences. I know a former teacher who in her first year of teaching was assigned all the low-performing students in her grade, and when she asked why, her principal said "We figured you'd be gone by November anyway."