How Experienced Are Your District’s Teachers?

How experienced are your district’s teachers? How experienced are the teachers in the districts around you?

A few weeks ago, we looked at this data in tables. Now we’re going to see it displayed a little differently…in map form.

We’ll look at average teacher experience and median teacher experience by district.

Yes, the average is the same as the “mean”, but saying “mean teacher experience” had an unpleasant ring to it.

What’s the difference between average and median?

Averages can be skewed if you have a teacher with many years experience in a small district. It can be valuable measure in a district with many teachers, but it’s still a good idea to look at the median.

The median is simply the middle of all of the values if you line them up from smallest to largest (or largest to smallest).

[Read this or this for a better explanation of average/mean and median.]

Here’s the average teacher experience by district. Zoom in to view the smaller districts. Click on a district to view the number of teachers and both the average and the median for the district.

Here’s the median teacher experience by district. Again, zoom in to view the smaller districts. Click on a district to view the number of teachers and both the average and the median for the district.

What do you see? What do these numbers mean to you?

The source for these maps was Local Education Agency Personnel System (LEAPS) data for October 2014, provided by the Alabama State Department of Education.

Further Reading

The Atlantic published this article just yesterday taking a look at the importance of teacher retention.

Here’s the Alliance for Excellent Education’s 2014 study that examined the types of supports that new teachers need.

NPR Education recently took a look at what has been described as a teacher shortage.

While we’re at it, take a look at the October 2014 PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward Public Schools, which gives a breakdown of how each group (Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and Public School Parents) responded to each question. Many of the questions are related to teachers.

P.S. The publication of this article signals the Alabama School Connection’s (ASC) new MailChimp notification system. If you would like to receive a daily digest of articles published by the ASC, please signup below and click the “Subscribe” button. We will never sell, publish or otherwise use your email address for any other reason than to notify you of new articles.

Also, the notice for this, uh, notice, didn’t go out as planned: Education Matters: Let’s Meetup! If you are anywhere near the Hoover Public Library on Sunday, June 28th at 2:30 p.m., please join me and others who believe that Education Matters.