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Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Geezer Teachers - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher

Geezer Teachers - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher:

Geezer Teachers

It went by so fast on my Twitter feed this morning that I can't even remember whose tweet it was--but the gist was this: "Career teachers" are becoming a thing of the past. Ouch.

Is that true? Certainly seems so, if the modal number of years' teaching experience in public schools is one-point-something.

In 1987-'88, the most common level of experience among the nation's 3 million K-12 public school teachers was 14 years in the classroom. By 2007-'08, students were most likely to encounter a teacher with just one or two years of experience.

So what happened? How did we get so many new teachers and what happened to the old ones? And when did