In an article in USA Today, a bevy of commentators explain why it may be a good thing that the teaching profession is now getting younger and less experienced.

The article reports:

Recent findings by Richard Ingersoll at the University of Pennsylvania show that as teacher attrition rates have risen, from about 10% to 13% for first-year teachers, schools are having to hire large numbers of new teachers. Between 40% to 50% of those entering the profession now leave within five years in what Ingersoll calls a “constant replenishment of beginners.”

The end result: a more than threefold increase in the sheer number of inexperienced teachers in U.S. schools. In the 1987-88 school year, Ingersoll estimates, there were about 65,000 first-year teachers; by 2007-08, the number had grown to more than 200,000. In the 1987-88 school year, he found, the biggest group of teachers had 15 years of experience. By the 2007-08 school year, the most recent data available, the biggest group of teachers had one year experience.

The brand new teachers, as Susan Fuhrman says, are ”very used to standardized testing,” she says. “They’ve grown up with it in some way. Maybe that’s healthy, in that they would be less obsessed with it.”

Fuhrman is president of Teachers College and also a member of the board of directors of Pearson.

Tim Daly, whose organization The New Teacher Project, was founded by Michelle Rhee, loves the idea of all these new teachers. TNTP exists to recruit them. He says that most were 11 years old when NCLB was passed, so they don’t know anything different from standardized testing and being held accountable for raising test scores. For them, it is the norm.

No voice in the article explains why experience matters.

No one asks why the teaching profession is being systematically dismantled.

Apparently having three years under your belt these days makes you a “grizzled veteran.”