An Article That Gets Most Things Right

Important points made:

• · The best teachers are, obviously enough, the best students. These are the people who know their subject and know how to learn. That means graduates from the best colleges, with the highest SAT scores.
• · Our current system instead draws teachers from the worst students. Our current teachers do not do as well on standardized tests as the students they are supposed to teach. How can teachers teach what they do not know?

“As a group, schools of education are non-selective. Their students post SAT scores at or below the average of all college graduates.”

“A proficient score on NAEP reading or math translates into at least a 600 on the SAT, or about a 1200 overall. The most generous estimate of the aptitude of new U.S. teachers recently estimated SAT scores of 515 in critical reading (formerly verbal) and 506 in math, or 1021 overall.”

“states frequently set Praxis passing scores at levels that translate into SAT reading-math scores of about 1000—well below current expectations for students.”

• · Teachers who graduate from Ed Schools are no better than teachers who do not.

“There is no evidence that licensing or certification creates better teachers or even sets a floor beneath which quality cannot fall.”

“sophisticated statistical analyses have been unable to find any benefit in teacher education for student achievement. Licensed or certified teachers appear to perform no better than teachers without certification”

• · The existence of Ed Schools prevents the best teachers from going into the profession.

“licensing requirements today serve largely as an impediment to attracting high quality”

“The time required for traditional certification through a bachelor’s or master’s degree in education also deters many bright students from even considering teaching.”

• · We would have a better system simply by abolishing Ed Schools and Education degrees, at least as a qualification for teaching.

• · A good way to reduce the costs of education would be simply to raise class sizes. A second way would be to use the educational technology available to us.

Where I disagree:

• · Raising teachers’ salaries would do little or nothing to improve teaching—unless it were incentive pay.
• · Evaluating individual teachers based on student achievement is practically impossible.
• · Teaching really is an art, to which some are born and others are not. It is cited as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, after all.
• · Teaching quality is more than student achievement. A better measure is student satisfaction. The person is more than his achievements in a specific academic subject.