From my anecdotal experience, maddening red tape like this is much more of a problem for attracting quality teachers than pay is. There are lots of people who are smart and driven but don't care much about money; just look at the ranks of the non-profit world. But you have to be a special kind of crazy to want to put up with these Kafkaesque rules.
This again is anecodotal, but my wife is in the process of working on her master's thesis in history. She went for the master's for personal development reasons, but now that she is close to getting it she started looking at what she wanted to do to pay off the student loans and thought of teaching.
Once she finishes she will meet the requirements to apply as a full instructor at the multiple community colleges within commuting distance, and as and adjunct professor/instructor at both the local 4 year college and the university she is about to graduate from. To teach at the public high schools though, she will need to go back and complete classes in education the equivalent of another full-time year in college.
Practically speaking, at a minimum, she should be required to demonstrate an ability to student teach for a half year before being hired.
There are definitely some tricks to running a good classroom, but I have no idea if the education courses are in anyway connected to what is needed for the real experience. At a minimum, I would hope they would provide some guidance in how to compensate for different learning styles, how to properly handle difficult students, etc.
I suspect this may a primary driver of net based education. Certainly it probably won't replace elementary and primary schools, but if accreditation can be achieved online, then you don't have to fuss with the "middleman" - which in this case often means dealing with arcane rules that protect the tenure of educators versus promoting quality education. I think I remember a Fred Wilson or Paul Kedrosky post a ways back on how home schooling was a particularly attractive market for education delivered over the net as a starting point.
Ironically, my wife has a problem of too much education. She graduated in 2006 with a bachelor's in both Elementary Education and English as a Second Language. She tried to get a job for a year somewhere in the state (Montana). No one would hire her because she didn't have enough practical education.
So she went back and got her Master's in English as a Second Language. Also while doing so she taught at the school to build up her "contracted" work experience.
Now she doesn't even get interviews for elementary teaching positions because she has too much education and too much experience. Most of the school districts have a policy to hire only those fresh out of school because they can pay them less.
My wife is a very talented teacher and just wants to be able to teach. She doesn't care about the money and would be happy to take the lowest pay grade available. Union rules require that they pay her at her experience/education level.
My wife, a civil engineer from Georgia Tech, was told she did not have enough college math credits to become a teacher in California. If she wanted to teach here, she would need to take another college math class, such as basic algebra.
Several years ago my family moved to Florida to be closer to my grandparents. My mother found out that the only teaching position she was "qualified" to do was as a substitute teacher. She had previously taught several different levels of Science in a different state, had a BS in Biology, a Masters in Chemistry and a Law Degree (Teaching was actually the 5th profession she tried). In order to teach science in Florida, she would be required to take roughly a year and a half worth of college courses, and get a different certification.
This is probably closely connected to why Florida is in the bottom 25% of states in terms of school quality.
The red tape scares away some of the best teachers.
Of course, I'm not sure any of those rankings compensate for social-economic factors that will skew these factors. What I have heard is that the Florida districts really set back the migrant students who ended up in my Mother in Laws classroom in NJ for part of every year. That might be due to them ending up in some of Florida's worst school districts of course.
A friend of mine from grad school had a similar experience.
Her daughter's school was short a math teacher and couldn't offer AP calc (which the daughter wanted to take). She offered to teach a class below calculus to free up a teacher for calc. For free, if necessary.
She was told she wasn't qualified. Her degrees: Ph.D. in Math, USA College. B.S. Math, Not USA college. No masters.
Her undergrad degree was apparently not sufficient.
(I'm obscuring some details to protect the guilty.)
I think the teaching certification cluster is due to a few cultural dynamics:
1. There is an overall trend to more bureaucratization, and bureaucracies often evaluate their officers based on formal certification, especially when there is no structure to measure output. So I support wide spread standardized testing ....
2. The public educational system is designed to enculturate the entire population, including a big proportion of folks that are needed to provide working class labor and reproduction of more working class laborers. So if 80% of the country get a crappy education due to a certification system that rewards mediocrity and punishes excellence, then the system has succeeded.
3. Good education hurts. Not be Nietszchean (sp?) or anything, but most people are taught that fun and ease are the highest ideals in life -- how can you really teach if you, your administrators, the kids, and the parents all believe that you should maximize personal pleasure rather than maximize personal accomplishment?
I apologize for the rant, but the unbelievably bad education in the US is probably the issue that most infuriates me.
Some sort of historical precedent, it seems. The school that gives that degree out within Georgetown was established with the express purpose of training diplomats post-WW1. Like, sort of a MBA but for politics and diplomacy?
"The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that any field that had the word "science" in its name was guaranteed thereby not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science. Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its
predictive power." (Gerald Weinberg, "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking")
Eh, I at least understand getting a BS in computer science degree if it's in the engineering school. As an engineer I'm required to take a very math and science heavy course load and all the various engineering core curricula. In addition, I can see computer science as being categorized as science for historical reasons, but if it's not science it is at least applied mathematics. Given that applied math is an engineering degree, I see no reason why computer science shouldn't be.
In contrast, not only does political science have nothing to do with science, but the course requirements aren't even science related. Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll take one basics statistics course. However, I have yet to see a polisci course that requires differential equations.
Yes. I just posted the fortune cookie because it's funny. In German we talk about natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and mind sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). I guess it's just in English that sciencies implies natural sciences.
Interestingly, while using math is in practice the hallmark of a proper science, in theory the experiment as final arbiter separates the sciences from the rest. So math, with no experiments to rely on, is not considered a proper science.
You're not gonna believe this but I was going to say the same thing. I speak German and was going to mention Naturwissenschaften/Geisteswissenschaften but I figured no one else on HN spoke German so it wouldn't be that helpful :)
BTW I wasn't using math as an example of why computer science is a science, but rather why it can be justified that computer science gets placed in the school of engineering and one earns a B.S.
As a graduate of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, I feel it's my duty to point out that the major difference between the core requirements of the SFS and the College of Arts & Sciences is that you have no math or science core requirement in the SFS. I think you end up having econ take the place of math & science in the SFS's core requirements, but the basic econ courses (micro, macro, int'l trade, int'l finance) do not require anything more than knowledge of algebra.
So yes, it is quite possible to get a political science degree and not know a single thing about math or science beyond your high school education.
Like most standardized testing ... like the largely invisible 'accreditation' establishment ... like most education ... certification has been politicized. That's because education has been twisted into a vehicle of social-engineering.
I'll quote Zinn the Wise here: "... honest, and therefore unmanageable."
Makes me think about how programmer certification would work in the context of licensing. Working as a government contractor, we already see a fair amount of certification requirements. At least those are tests though, just taking courses doesn't guarantee much of anything.
Teacher certification is vitally important: it props up teacher wages.
Oh, did anyone think it had another purpose?
Education is a funny field. When you test the IQ of people by university subject, you generally find that the hard sciences have the highest IQs (physics and math at the top) followed by the social sciences followed by the artsy stuff. Education is at the very bottom.
However, in every field but education, you find that people with PhDs are smarter than the people with Master's who tend to be smarter than people with just BS or BA degrees.
Education is the only field where this is reversed. The people with PhDs are the dumbest of the lot.
I heard a funny story once about someone who cheated on his teacher certification exam. He had failed twice and was about to lose his job. So he paid a homeless person to take the test for him. They only caught the cheater because the homeless guy scored better than anyone else in the district and officials got curious about the improvement.
rant warning
I may get voted down simply for using loaded phrases, but stepping around them would be laborious. the largest labor unions in the US (Teachers, AMA, etc) operate off a marxist labor theory. this is completely fucking ridiculous considering the average education level of these organization's members. how long is it going to take basic econ to sink into the general knowledge base of humanity? the world seems completely mired in mid 19th century economic thought. If we can't at least get to the level of understanding marginal utility it is going to kill us. More modern economic theories are paid lip service to in the form of being implemented whenever doing so is politically expedient. This is the polar opposite of the spirit of econ. An economist by definition looks past the consequences that are of immediate concern to the public/political body.
OTOH: massive tech improvements causing changes to society will probably hit before we WWIII ourselves with our economic ignorance so all the angst may be for nothing. that is if economic ignorance doesn't (continue to) severely hamper technological improvements to the point that we fall short of saving ourselves from ourselves.
"When you test the IQ of people by university subject, you generally find that the hard sciences have the highest IQs (physics and math at the top) followed by the social sciences followed by the artsy stuff."
"[T]he artsy stuff?" Another good indicator of high IQ is not being completely dismissive of things that you have no experience in. Try it out.
HN has a lot of biases. We're more economically conservative than average, much more pro-motivation, and there's a lot of contempt for the arts here. It's a shame, since otherwise this is a terrific community.
Its interesting how differently people see things. I would consider We're more economically conservative than average, much more pro-motivation, to be positives.
I do agree that a genuine contempt for the arts is a bad thing, but I haven't seen a ton of that.
I like having good arguments on both sides. I'm not saying that pro-motivation or pro-conservation is bad, because it's not. At the same time, I've got a lot of friends on both extremes of the economic argument, both anarchosocialist and Objectivist-libertarian, and I think there's a lot of value to be had by arguing both sides. Similarly, the calmer life philosophies that are less about motivation and more about contentment aren't thrown about as much here, and so sometimes conversations seem a bit lopsided.
Third it doesn't account for the other benefits. Every teacher belongs to a union which means full benefits (medical, dental, vision) and a generous pension/401(k) matching program
Finally, you have to take into account the hours. School hours are generally 8a to 2p with an hour lunch. Teachers get a prep period so they don't have to stay late and they often get contract pay for most extra curricular activities (coaching sports for example). So even if you take the 45,000 a year number (which is again low) divide it by 180 school days a year and then 6 hours a day you get an hourly wage of $41.66 (The equivalent of $86,652 per year in a normal job)
Um, I'm not entirely sure why you think teachers only work 6 hours a day. I know a few high school teachers, and between lesson prep, grading, meeting with parents, etc. they work way, way more than 40 hours a week.
Teachers work 24 fewer minutes per weekday and 42 minutes per Saturday than other professionals. They worked a little bit more on Sundays, I'd guesstimate about 10 minutes based on the graph. (The weekday and saturday numbers are given in the text, the sunday number is not.)
Table 5 suggests this works out to about 7 hours and 15 minutes per weekday, and about 1 hour per saturday, maybe 1.5 hours per sunday. That's just shy of 39 hours/week, for 10 months/year.
Useful link, but I think your interpretation is slightly off.
I don't think that table is limited to full time teachers.
Table 10 seems to make it clear that it isn't.
The full time teachers that I know put in more than 40 hours a week. That being said, the pay is usually decent when compared with the cost of living. I certainly make more than many of my relatives who are teachers in central Illinois, but the costs of living tend to offset most of that. The teachers working locally are fairly well compensated for their jobs.
From everything I've seen, outside of the sciences, computers, and mathematics fields, teachers are paid well for their education. (I'm not sure how business fits in there. )
Paragraph 3 on Page 55 (which is describing Table 5) indicates that it refers to full time teachers. It's true that the caption doesn't make it completely clear, however.
Table 10 says full time teachers work about 5.5 hours/day (averaged over a week) which adds up to 38.5 hours/week. My estimate from Table 5 was 38.25 hours/week.
I have to call Bulls*t on that. Again, they have a prep period to do things in. That's 5 hours a week for grading, lesson prep etc... (and the reality is most teachers get their lesson plans off one of the hundreds of web sites that provide that service now days). As for meeting with parents, last I checked that doesn't happen too often. My parents never met any of my High School teachers.
It may very well be 7 or 8 hours a day. I'd concede that's possible. But over 40 hours a week? That (including the prep period) would be nearly 14 hours a week devoted to grading papers. I just don't think so.
Edit: Thinking a little more on this. Average Class Size in California is about 23 students per teacher (http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed09.htm). Lets assume 2 assignments per week and just to make it fair lets assume they're typed essay based assignments (that the teacher has to read through and grade rather than multiple choice). A teacher has 5 periods so that's about 115 students or 230 assignments per week. The average words per typed page is about 600 and the average adult reads 250wpm (http://ezinearticles.com/?What-is-the-Average-Reading-Speed-...). Even under that heavy workload you're only looking at about 9 hours worth to grade it all and honestly that's with an unrealistic workload. No teacher assigns two full page typed essays every week.
But you're assuming the only thing teachers do is grade papers and teach. This isn't a spreadsheet calculation here.
Teachers also council students, tutor, do extra work such as activity clubs (debate club, for instance), coach sports, etc. Some of these, such as coaching, they may get paid an extra fee for, but it's not usually much. Most teachers (I know a few) feel lucky if they get to do these things, because it's usually working in a smaller group with the students that are excelling in the subject. In other words, the reason teachers want to teach in the first place..
Oh yea, and there's actually preparing to teach the class. When's the last time you gave a speech to 30 people with no outline? And then, you still have to grade the work.
And don't forget time to deal with parents too. Trust me, I've seen what they do, I'll take my 9-5 cubicle any day.
But how? Again, here's the facts I'm basing my opinion on:
1. I know, for a fact, that the School District in my area has a list of approved sites from which teachers can get lessons plans from. So they don't have to make those up from scratch.
2. Every teacher is guaranteed a prep period to take care of work
3. Grading shouldn't take all that much time. I could be missing something (and if so please tell me) but I ran the numbers above and they seem pretty accurate.
If public teachers really are as underpaid and over worked as they say I'd like to know about it. But they never offer any explanation and the numbers I can come up with (see above) paint a different picture.
Average reading speed means nothing: you have to add time to write comments in the margins and mark up the paper, you read more slowly when you're grading, often you're working with hard-to-read handwriting, and math problems (show your work!) take time to go through and debug, especially if you're giving partial credit (suppose I make a mistake at step 2 but the rest of my answer is logically consistent with that mistake...).
One one page typed essay assignment per week? I had 5 page papers, 20 page term projects, weekly quizzes in class, exams, 30 math problems once or twice a week, labs.
Of 30 math problems about five would be randomly selected and checked. 30 seconds on average to check a problem on your class size assumptions is about 5 hours a week (this is an average between about 10 seconds for someone who gets it right and 1-2 minutes for someone who makes some amount of mistakes and needs careful correction). Then you have quizzes and exams: let's amortize that to about 10 questions per week, and you need to carefully inspect them for partial credit. That's another 20 hours a week (let's say you take a full minute per problem). That's 25 hours a week to grade math.
I don't find the IQ correlation that important, to be honest. What makes a good educator? Is it the ability to process IQ-type problems? Or is it more tied to some other attribute not measured by IQ, say, emphasizing with students? (I have no clue, just saying that IQ may or may not be the end all be all for educators).
Are you seriously defending the thesis that it doesn't matter whether a teacher is smart, bearing in mind that just about the only thing IQ is good for is predicting good academic performance which is exactly the sort of thing we're looking for (for once!)?
"A ditz who can really connect to the students" sounds like a mortal threat to my child's education, not something to be celebrated!
Personality is a lot more important than intelligence in elementary school. You should actually be smarter than your students, yes, but dealing with young kids takes a certain temperament and ability to adapt to personality differences.
Between kindergarten and fifth grade, I'd probably rate my teachers entirely based upon personality. The ones who lost their temper with me or were arbitrary or capricious in discipline were bad teachers. To some extent this remained true even until eighth grade (I was somewhat of a disciplinary problem until high school), but middle school is where my teachers' stupidity started becoming an issue.
In high school, most of my teachers were pretty smart at what they taught. But personality still mattered.
Education ought to be about more than academic performance. I see what you're saying, but having teachers that can't work with students is just as much a problem as having teachers that don't know their subject.
Then, of course, there are the teachers that can't do either. I TA'd a writing class with a teacher that was both ignorant and disliked, who was kept on because of tenure. Not a nice position to think of.
I think it really depends on the subject being taught. I had an eighth grade Algebra teacher who could barely do the problems herself. She could empathize with the student pretty well, especially when neither of them could figure out how the get the answer in the key.
It's possible to teach a subject while not being an expert. That's where a good teacher pulls them in and helps teach the students how to learn on their own. That being said, this requires a teacher who is at least as intelligent as their students.
Apparently my grandfather ended up teaching a course he was taking while in the military. He was able to teach it better than whomever was originally assigned as the teacher.
* when neither of them could figure out how the get the answer in the key.*
It's possible that the answer in the key was wrong. I spent a few years volunteering for RFBD.org, reading math & science textbooks a few hours a week, and many of the texts had answers in the back which frequently were not for the question in the front.
Unfortunately that was not the case. She just had to rely on the smarter students to help her. Then they hired us (woohoo 4.15/hr) to come tutor the algebra class after school three times a week while we were in high school. Almost every algebra student came to the tutoring session most of the time. The teacher never showed up once.
