DaveShearon

Teacher smarts

In a Spring 2006 Newsletter, the Teacher Quality Partnership of Ohio announced results of a survey of 10,000 2003-2005 graduates of Ohio Teacher Preparation programs:

• Average GPA of 3.47 on 4.0 scale
• Average ACT of 22.52
• Average SAT 1074.04

The ACT and SAT scores are one standard deviation above both Ohio and national norms.  The report states, "These grades and test scores create a stronger academic profile than some would expect...."  Yep.  This backs up the results of a College Board study from a few years ago showing that teachers' writing and math skills are comparable to those of engineers and lawyers, and their altruism is much higher. Hopefully, this kind of data will begin to convince school boards to support, even demand, administrative actions to develop and count on teacher-led instructional improvement.

Count me as not surprised

From a comment  by JennyD to this post at Up the Down Staircase:

I teach in an ed school, and I'm also involved in doing a review of what the ed school teaches. What I discovered is that a number of ed school instructors--both former teachers and academics--tell our students that teaching is not preplanned, that they don't need to learn practices, that their teaching should emerge organically from their interaction with students. I've also discovered that our instructors are not unusual, and that lots of people in ed schools say these things.

These folks teach our students that there aren't necessarily better ways to build skills, and that there aren't skills that are best taught together.

You would be surprised how many ed school faculty are entirely out of touch with what teachers do in classrooms.

Like I said, count me as not surprised.  Perhaps this is one the data indicates he teachers are overwhelmingly ineffective and take up to 10 or 12 years to reach peak effectiveness.

Anything but White and Western

Update 8/25/2004: Welcome Joanne Jacob readers. In a way, I'm sorry this is the first post you'll read on this site. It is far more tart than my norm. See the follow-up in AWW, Part 2 for more perspective. Look around, or visit ShearonforSchools.com for more on my ideas about improving public schools.

hipteacher posts about getting ready for her first year as a teacher this year, including a class of 11th grade World Literature:

I am using my mini-vacation before school to read up on "world" literature. My new textbooks won't arrive until about 5 weeks after school starts and I'm not familiar with much of the material. The world is awfully big, and I haven't been exposed to near enough of it. My big sister lent me a copy of her Norton World Lit anthology that she used in college which was published in 1985. There is only about two selections in the entire book that I don't consider white and western, and therefore, not really what I want my class to be about.

Bad news: she came out of college and ed school unprepared.

Good news: she knows it, and she's doing something about it.

Bad news: she's thinks teaching the works of white westerners is a bad thing.

Bad news: she apparently has no clue of the ramifications of this statement.

On balance: bad news.

Harry Potter and a French Professor of Education

I guess this NY Times article (hat tip: Instapundit) paticularly caught my eye as I am in Quebec City for an extra night (thanks to the second straight Nortwest Airlines flight cancelled on me due to mechanical problems). It's by "a professor of literary theory and French literature at the University Institute of Teacher Training in Nice" and was translated from French by the Times. (Hopefully they translate without bias!)

The gist of the critique seems to be that the Harry Potter stories warp kids minds because the characters compete not only with themselves but with each other, buy things -- not only from each other and nearby "boutiques" but (oh! the horror!) from multinational corporations.

And then there's this little jewel of a thought:

The psychological conditioning of the apprentice sorcerers is clearly based on a culture of confrontation: competition among students to be prefect; competition among Hogwarts "houses" to win points; competition among sorcery schools to win the Goblet of Fire; and, ultimately, the bloody competition between the forces of Good and Evil.

Yep. We all know there's no Evil in the world that needs fighting. Those poor young men that flew those planes into the World Trade Center towers were just misunderstood! Right. Somehow, I think Pat Tillman was better grounded in reality than this idiot.

And, of course, he tops it off by suggesting that the series' preference for entrepreneurs over buereaucrats is misplaced. And of course, he can point to the great job the French intelligence service did in identifying the extent of Saddam Husein's weapons of mass destruction. Oops. My bad. Idiot.

Bar Exams and Teacher Exams

For those who think that tests for prospective teachers or maybe improved teacher education is the secret to improved learning experiences for k-12 students, here's a portion of a post that looks at my own profession and heavily criticizes (and with some basis, I might add) both law schools and bar exams. By way of caution, I will add that I recently sat in a meeting with a lawyer I've known since very early in my practice who is extremely bright, hardworking and successful, and who has started teaching his own CLE program for young lawyers because some of what he sees, and the phone calls he gets, scare him to death. He thinks the problem with the market approach is the lives it ruins along the way. I think the same can be said for education. Which, of course, is not to say that we shouldn't work on improving education schools and the requirements for teacher licensure in meaningful ways. But, don't expect them to ever be perfect. It's still going to take continuing education and a different professional culture to get those quality learning experiences for kids. But, with that caution, read on and compare:

It's hard to say which is dumber: the fact that your law school failed to prepare you adequately for the bar exam, or the fact that you have to take such an absurd test at all.

After dropping as much as $100,000 and spending three years obtaining a law degree, you probably don't know enough law to practice it professionally; most law school graduates don't. Now perhaps you're wondering: if the point of law school was not to prepare you for the practice of law, just what was the point of law school? Easy: the point of law school was to make money for the law school. Mission accomplished! Oh, and as a secondary matter, the point of law school was to flatter the egos and delusions of the brainiacs who teach there. And that, young law school graduate, is why you can pontificate at endless length on theories of critical legal deconstructionist realism as touching upon Marxist feminist radical queer Afro-Latino post-structural comparative gender issues, but you still can't write a damn will.

Certifying Teachers

I deal with certification of specialists for attorneys, so I know something of the challenges inherent in valid, reliable identification of superior practitioners. When I was on the Board, I argued against paying bounses for teachers who get NBPTS certification on the ground that its relation to more effective teaching had not been established. The debate continues.