Mediocrity in analysis…
Scott McLeod on Dangerously Irrelvant links an article on teacher “mediocrity” on Eduwonk. The piece made a very mediocre argument saying the reason that teacher are of such poor quality is that people who are talented don’t go into to teaching because they perceive that education institutions have mediocre values, and the talent sensitive are repelled by this.
This is part of an extended lovefest between Eduwonk and Mickey Kaus of Bloggingheads based on Mickey’s suggestion to fire incompetent teachers as the answer to our education woes: http://www.eduwonk.com/2007/03/still-firing.html .
There were some even more disturbing posts in the bloggingheads forum on issues that the writers seemed to know little about like teacher preperation. There seem to be a lot of lay people out there who think that if you have a professional degree, there’s no need to waste time with a vacuous education program. People seem to mistake subject matter knowledge, with pedagogy (and the ability to teach). I find this very troubling. Maybe we need to do a better job of explaining the difference? This is especially critical at the elementary level where we are teaching students to read and write. You can’t throw someone into a classroom with a law degree and expect them to know how to do that. As frustrating as I often found my reading instruction/methods/theory classes, I was glad to at least have that, because very little else I studied in college had anything to teach me about teaching young children.
It seems that everyone (except teachers, of course) is an expert on education. I get so tired of being treated as a sub-par human being just because I have chosen to work in this field.
Perhaps if we threw more of these blathering experts into the classroom (for more than minimal tour time), then they might better understand and respect the intellect, hard work and talent required to be an effective educator. . . I don’t know. I hate to subject children to such experimentation though.
Thanks Ms. Whatsit. Scott McLeod assures me that there are studies supporting the mediocrity theory. He’s in the middle of a bunch of work stuff now, but may provide more on this at some point when the paperwork dies down. I still stand by what I said about eduwonk’s analysis being mediocre because the one claim he didn’t cite was about teacher mediocrity and it was the core of his argument.
A long overdue reply…
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/c1/c1s5.htm
http://www.reformk12.com/archives/000094.nclk
http://tinyurl.com/yrvtwq
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. The NSF notes that ‘students tend to learn more from teachers with strong academic skills than they do from teachers with weak academic skills’ and that teachers generally have some of the lowest standardized test scores of any profession.
I wonder if this accounts for many teacher’s loathing standardized tests? My own experience would not contradict these studies. Strangely though, some of the best elementary teachers I’ve known were not intellectual heavyweights. They weren’t dull, but they were very pragmatic and not given to intellectual pursuits or discourse.