A lot of the teacher quality conversation has to do with equitable distribution, something that will be sure to come up during ESEA reauthorization. It seems like its important to decide if you think our teacher quality proxies, experience and credentials, matter in the equity conversation

a) so little that we shouldn’t bother with them, and by the way where is that value-added data already?

b) enough that it’s worth cracking down on the unequal distribution of these things via federal law

c) a lot, and by the way our school of education is offering a new credential, would you like to sign up?

Charlie Barone seems to be in the B camp, blogging (with a really untimely title) that

I don’t think you need to be a rocket scientist, a school finance lawyer, or even an education policy expert to get that the pervasive inequities in the quality of teaching offered to poor and minority children meet both of these criteria. No matter how you measure it, poor and minority children are shortchanged when it comes to teacher experience, licensure, and subject matter competence. Usually this is on the order of a factor of 2 to 3 – they are 2 to 3 times more likely, on average, to have less experienced teachers, teachers teaching out of field, and teachers with less than full licensure. Contrary to popular belief, these factors matter, though of course they don’t explain everything.

Here’s my “dear Internet” question. Is the research that looks at the relationship between experience and credentials all done using large samples of diverse schools? Because my experience has been this: In the relatively good, relatively affluent school I taught in, experience and credentials seemed to be related to effectiveness. But in the terrible schools I’ve been in, that’s less true, especially where really good younger teachers are there crusading against the achievement gap.

Does such a good school vs. bad school difference exist? If it does, do we risk making things in the bad school worse if we enforce distribution of experience and credentials?