Is an Education Revolving Door Such a Bad Thing?
To have long-term prosperity, a country needs good schools. And it’s hard to have good schools without good teachers. And teaching effectively is, in turn, hard. Also hard is getting certification to teach. But, interestingly, the evidence suggests that there’s little correlation between the effectiveness of a teacher and whether he or she came through a standard certification program or one of the many “alternative certification” programs that exist around the country. Thus, there’s good reason to think that, as Robin Chait and Michele McLaughlin write, “These programs are among the most promising strategies for expanding the pipeline of talented teachers, particularly for subject shortage areas and high-needs schools.” But though alternative certification programs exist in all 50 states, in many states they’re not very robust and/or there’s no clear vision of how what’s already in place could be expanded and built upon. How to do that is the subject of their paper, but at the event CAP hosted based around the paper skepticism focused on the idea that alternatively certified teachers don’t stay in the profession long enough:
Richelle Patterson, senior policy analyst at the National Education Association, echoed concerns about the readiness of many alternatively certified teachers. She called traditional teacher training programs “career-starters,” and said that many alternative certification programs lead to a “revolving door.”
This just doesn’t seem like a huge problem to me. Evidence suggests that teachers improve their skills in their first couple of years in the classroom but that after that, additional experience doesn’t do a great deal to improve performance. So while there’s nothing wrong with veteran teachers, it’s not particularly crucial to get people to make a life-long commitment to teaching. And of course people who teach for a couple of years and find that they don’t have a taste for it should be encouraged to leave, not encouraged to stay.
More broadly, we’ve moved over the past 20-30 years to a much more flexible employment market. It’s less common than it once was for people to stay in the same job for long stretches of time, and more common for people to switch fields. In principle, this could be an opportunity for schools to pick up mid-career professionals who decide there’s something appealing about a teacher’s work schedule or who are suffering from structural shifts in the economy but still have the kind of basic subject-matter knowledge that could be the basis for effective teaching. Even if the economy recovers robustly, for example, there are going to be sectoral shifts involved and plenty of people with math and science skills who were working in finance or automotive engineering will need new jobs. Some sub-set of those people would probably make good math or science teachers. And conversely, there may be young people who are interested in teaching and potentially good at it but who just aren’t sure they want to commit to a lifetime in the field. This is a labor market that it would be good to tap. Unfortunately, the structure of current pension policies discourages that. And so does a mentality that says no pathway into the profession can be a good one unless it produces someone who’ll keep teaching for decades. But we should be moving in the opposite direction—more flexible pensions that let people change jobs, and more encouragement of “alternative” teachers.
Another thing I would note is that there’s “revolving” and then there’s revolving. A friend of mine in college did Teach for America for a couple of years, then revolved out the door to a position with a state Department of Education, then revolved to a teaching job in a different city, and now is an administrator at a charter school serving low-income kids in Boston. In this case, it’s true that her stay in the first school was likely too short-term for her students to benefit from peak-effectiveness teaching (but then again, it’s not as if highly skilled teachers had been clamoring for positions in high-poverty schools in the urban south and getting displaced by TFA kids), but it’s definitely wrong to portray her as a dilettante who just ducked in-and-out of education for two years. There’s an enduring benefit to bringing people into the general field of education and working in troubled districts that’s independent of the issue of how long someone stays in the exact position they were placed in.
72 Responses to “Is an Education Revolving Door Such a Bad Thing?”
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March 3rd, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Schwarzenegger put some initiatives on the 2005 California ballot that would have cut back on the old lifetime employment for teachers model that Matt attacks here. They got stomped by Arnold formerly admiring constituents. As private sector jobs get ever iffier, civil service jobs with tenure, pension, and health care get ever more popular.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:35 pm
You’ve got my attention, because I sometimes end up counseling students who are choosing between these two paths.
The thing I’ve heard about TFA is that there’s a distinct baptism-by-fire character to the experience. They make an effort to prepare and support people, but the account I heard suggested that the support wasn’t sufficient — at least in this person’s case — to keep them from becoming shell-shocked and leaving the education field altogether.
It’s hard to know how much of that is avoidable, but hearing about MY’s friend has changed my perspective on this at least a bit.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:38 pm
There is no substitute for experience in the classroom; 2 years doesn’t cut it, nor does it necessarily prepare you for the front office, unless your front office duties are of the management/budget kind, and not the education kind.
Matt, stop talking about education. Please.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:39 pm
“To have long-term prosperity, a country needs good schools.”
Not so, we need good education, not necessarily schools. Smart kids in our town are going for personal study and skipping the classroom. Locally they use vacant office space in a local strip mall, which has no class rooms.
How much does the average worker need in terms of skills at the classroom desk? He needs about 50-80 hours, at most. From there the student can handle any class room activity he is required on the job. How many hours of education does the average worker need? About 200-300 per year.
Personal study is the dirty little secret of education, work on one’s except for an hour per week of consultation with the teacher. It works best, and moves the student far ahead of any kid stuck in Mr. Yglesias classroom method.
Like his love of 1880s train technology, Mr. Yglesias had a nostalgia for old style class room teaching, but technology has passed him by.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Some of the fairly successful charter schools you hear so much about follow this model: you hire youngish teachers with a few years under the belt who have shown they are good at their jobs, then you burn them out over the next few years. You report really good test score results at the beginning, but can you maintain that? Do you have to keep badgering good teachers into quitting and replacing them, or do you let them slack off?
The essential problem with teaching is that you can get people, especially women, to work really hard for other people’s children … but not, in many, cases, _after_ they have children of their own.
Historically, the solution for this problem was usually teacher celibacy, which was a formal requirement for nuns teaching at Catholic schools and was an informal requirement for dons at Cambridge and masters at Eton.
Celibacy is probably not going to work as a job requirement in 21st Century America.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:45 pm
I agree that people who don’t want to teach shouldn’t stay int he profession. But the thing that really holds some schools together are the cohort of veteran teachers. I think its great your friend taught for TFA and she was likely better than a long term sub.
But your friend has stayed in education. Speaking as a former teacher in a big city school district, I would say that is pretty important. Teachers’ skills may not improve much after their first few years, but those first few years include huge improvements in skill. This is based on my own experience and observation, but I would say that most first year teachers are largely ineffective. The kids who want to learn will, but they would learn anyway. Most second year teachers can control a classroom, but are still having trouble with their instruction.
Now imagine, say a middle school, where the turnover of teachers is high and up to half the teachers are in their first three years. This means that in some large fraction of their classes, students aren’t learning what they will need for the next year. So you end up with science classes where you have to go back and teach students how to add fractions. Students in 7th grade who literally can’t read. Students who have had a large number of first and second year teachers are going to have had a poor education.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Classic bamboozled by “statistics say” post by Matt.
I would just say that certification was not and was never the real issue.
Pay and respect is the issue.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:47 pm
If you want less teacher burnout, the administrations should give them more support, especially on discipline: detentions, suspensions, and expulsions.
Unfortunately, many school districts are so terrified of lawsuits over discipline, especially ones pointing to disparate outcomes by race, that they throw the disciplining burden on the teachers who are supposed to throw it on the parents.
But if the parents were effective people, they wouldn’t be sending their kids to some crummy school in the first place. The parents are looking for help from societal institutions, such as the schools, to impose discipline on their little hellions.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Also, a high turnover rate means that a large percentage of the students at any point in time are being subjected to people who aren’t cut out for teaching, but just haven’t discovered it yet.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:54 pm
If alternatively certified teachers perform at the same level as traditionally certified teachers, couldn’t that be an indication that they make up an appropriate percentage of teacher certifications? Isn’t just as likely that if these programs are expanded a diminishing returns will occur and we’ll get lower quality teachers from alternative certification?
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:55 pm
In a study of more than 132,000 students and 4,400 teachers in the Houston public-school district, Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Education, and three colleagues found that students taught by certified teachers outperformed those taught by noncertified teachers in reading and mathematics. Uncertified T.F.A. teachers had negative impacts on student achievement on five of six tests. Tellingly, their effectiveness improved when they gained certification.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Sailer: Solid on 9, very iffy on 8. Keep tryin’, man!
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:57 pm
The fixation on teachers is misplaced.
If the objective is to give each child his/her maximum education, then that needs to be defined for each child – their potential varies along a normal distribution.
Expecting each child to be above average is sorta stupid.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Yep, this make perfect sense.
In every other profession, craft, and job, experience improves the quality of work and the usefulness of the worker.
Except, of course, in teaching, where you get smarter for a couple of years and then get dumber and less effcient. What an astonishing profession teaching is! Lets get teams of psychologists and biologists to study this amazing phenomenon.
Way to spit on the people who spent years trying to pound some sense and knowledge into your heads, guys!
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I understand the argument behind alternative certification programs – it’s an easy way to get young, enthusiastic teachers as well as mid-career professionals with an interest in teaching. But based on articles I’ve read and the experience of a friend (with NYC’s teaching fellowships, which place an additional demand on the teachers of simultaneously earning a M.A. in education), it’s not just a revolving door at the end of the contract – people are quitting halfway through the year because these programs do such a crappy job preparing them for the rigor of the classroom setting. And that loss of stability is terrible for students. Additionally, as Giovanni mentions above, if a large fraction of your faculty is persistently made up of new teachers without the appropriate level of skills and experience, you wind up with not one or two classes taught poorly (as would happen with any new teacher), but with a large number of classes taught badly, because none of the kids get to benefit from a teacher’s hard-earned experience.
Maybe alternative certification programs could work – but the way they’re currently designed doesn’t help anyone.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Or a high turnover rate means that a large percentage of students are subjected to being taught by people who aren’t cut out to teach for the salary offered.
The big reason I quit teaching was that the compensation was not acceptable for my qualifications and the amount of time I was putting in. I’m not a saint. I liked teaching, but I wasn’t willing to teach if 1) the school was falling apart, 2) there were insufficient textbooks, 3) I was spending my own money on supplies to do labs, 4) and I had to go to certification classes that made me want to kill people.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:59 pm
The thing I’ve heard about TFA is that there’s a distinct baptism-by-fire character to the experience.
I don’t know anyone who’s gone through their first year of teaching in a high-poverty school–regardless of the route they came through–that didn’t consider it something of a baptism by fire. Even most of the teachers I know who’ve worked only in suburban schools found their first year one of the most painful and demanding things they’ve ever done. That’s not an issue of TFA, it’s an issue of how we structure the profession: there’s no other career in which someone right out of college or training is expected, on their first day in the job, to do virtually the same job with the same responsibilities as someone who’s been their 20 years. Traditional teacher preparation programs put a lot of requirements on the front end but don’t typically provide any more support once teachers are in their first jobs–and often provide much less–than alternative routes or TFA do.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:00 pm
My other teaches, and I would never consider it myself precisely because it seems to be impossible to impose any kind of real discipline. Maybe NS could explain why it is only “iffy” that there is a problem here? (I’m from Canada but I doubt it makes much of a difference.)
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:00 pm
*mother
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Honest Question: Name an occupation other than teaching where the person with ten years experience has the same workload as someone who just started that day.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Friend’s daughter had terrible experience TFA in South Bronx as a science teacher. No support at all. Pupils with terrible unattended health problems and tragic family situations. She left teaching and now runs a private tutoring business.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Even alternative certification isn’t the whole answer. I was a university professor for more than a dozen years. When I retired early, I wanted to teach at an inner city high school in my area. I was told that I was’t qualified, and that I needed to spend about three years and upwards of $30,000 to obtain 36 credit hours in education courses before I could even attempt the certification test. (I had already passed exemplar tests on the internet).
Needless to say, I made other plans. I am now teaching English in another country where they are more than happy to allow someone with my experience to teach in their high schools.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Brendan:
I’m a teacher, and I just don’t see the lack of discipline (especially as defined as detention, suspension, or expulsion) as a huge factor getting in the way of teachers doing their jobs. I’ve had the fortune of working with some great principals, and they all seemed to try hard to eschew these types of punishments. My feeling is that they did this because these types of interventions don’t work. After all, you wind up seeing the same kids in detention every week anyway.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:07 pm
2nd lieutenant
police/firefighter
any pro athlete
associate professor
elected official
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Steve is absolutely right about teacher burnout re: discipline. While in engineering school I worked as a teaching assistant for Title IX (at risk students) in my local high school. I seriously considered teaching as an alternative to an engineering career UNTIL I had to deal with “Other People’s Children” in a classroom setting.
As long as the little darlings are aware (and they are) that the teachers and administration are hamstrung enforcing discipline they will force many good potential teachers to walk. Who needs to be a prison guard when what you wanted to do is share your knowledge and experience.
Although I found ample oppurtunity to positively interact with kids as a sports and competitive problem solving coach without having to deal with the discipline issue, there is still a need for GOOD teachers, and education is losing them to other fields because of this issue.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:14 pm
2nd LT: probably a captain at least after 10 years.
Police: Rookies are always paired with veterans if the unless Hollywood is lying to me.
Pro athletes: Most teams break rookies in slowly.
Associate professor: I’ve never heard of this . . . might not be real job.
Elected official: Freshman congressman are not committee chairs, generally.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:16 pm
maybe said
A newly promoted 2nd lieutenant may have the same workload and responsibilities as a 10yr vet. But he didn’t jump from the enlistment office to that rank. He was promoted. And going through that process (boot camp, PFC, corporal) taught skills that would be useful.
AFAIK, newly graduated police officer are paired with veterans. Most departments don’t hand a new officer their badge, gun, and uniform and consider them the equivalent of a ten year vet.
I don’t know about associate professors, but I think often they are excused from committee requirements that older faculty must serve on.
A rookie wide receiver has the same workload as a ten year veteran? How much playing time did this year’s crop of NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, MLS rookies get compared to veterans playing their positions?
you might have a point about elected officials
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Matt can you explain why you think getting a teaching certificate should be easier? Or is it the fact that people have to get certified at all?
Being well versed in advanced engineering doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to make the material relevant or interesting to 17 year olds. Nor does it mean you know how to manage the pace of classroom, address all of the relevant points in the curriculum, lesson plan, grade, and set up the next unit so that you build on the previous knowledge learned. I’m tired of education being seen as a job someone can do once they retire, which is how you’ve framed it here, or something someone can dip in and out of. Knowledge of subject matter and knowledge of pedagogy are different kinds of knowledge. Hence, the reason for a certification process.
The reason why alternative certification programs are hard is because, at least in Texas, they put people in classrooms as the teacher of record while that person is taking classes in education theory, classroom management, and pedagogy. You are balancing lesson planning, daily interaction with your students, grading, and other forms of assessment with taking course work at the same time. Do we need to revise how we training first year teachers? Absolutely. I think a co-teaching situation the first year or two makes a lot of sense, whether or not you go through traditional or alternative certification. It would help improve the novice teacher, while also making the work load (which can be daunting) more manageable.
Your point about mid-career shifts seeming good in our current economic climate needs to be revised as well. In Texas, at least, teachers pay into a separate retirement system than Social Security. If say, like my aunt, you worked in other fields before becoming a teacher, you forfeit your Social Security benefits once you start paying into the teacher retirement system. You can’t get both.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:28 pm
as a California teacher, I can tell you one of the main problems with revolving: NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND.
People not in the teaching field have no idea how much that legislation is damaging our schools and faculty.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:35 pm
There’s a basic conundrum that’s not well understood.
There are two distinct polar-opposite forms of teaching (and lots of gray areas in-between, but let’s think about the polar cases for clarity):
1. Centrally scripted: The teachers follow a professionally designed script.
2. Individually improvised: The teachers make up their own lesson plans.
The first approach will tend to work better for less competent and less experienced teachers, but it will tend drive out of the business the smarter, more creative, and more experienced teachers.
The second approach tends to be more popular with Ed Schools and teacher’s unions because it assumes that teachers are highly motivated, highly inspired creative artists. Which is true in some cases, but it’s not true in others. So, you get new hires dropped into classrooms with six weeks of training and no lesson plans. They are supposed to make up their own lesson plans. It would be a pretty funny situation if it weren’t kids’ educations we’re talking about.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
I think LL is on to something with the comment about co-teaching, at least for “non-traditional” teachers. In my admittedly short experience in the classroom it appeared to me that much of the classroom management needs to be learned in a hands on fashion to develop any real talent for it. Knowledge of pedagogy is necessary as well, and could be offered as accelerated classes.
However, first hand experience of what is revelant to the workplace is a powerful incentive for encouraging both mid career and retired professionals to enter the teaching profession. I’m not claiming they would do a better job than teachers that sought a certification and teaching career as a first profession, they have different shortcomings, but the absolute best professors I had while pursuing my education were the ones that had been there and done that.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:41 pm
LL,
Here’s how it could be easier:
When I got my teaching credential I realized very quickly why so many people leave/don’t enter the profession. You take 1-2 years out of your life to train for a job where there is no pay. If you were hired on at say, a clothing store, and they told you that you had to train for a significant amount of time with no pay you’d laugh at them right?
With teaching credentials comes a hefty workload as well as the inability to have another real source of income. Field work, student teaching, etc. I was able to do it because after my BA, my parents were cool with me moving back in. I taught all day, no pay, and worked in a bookstore at night. People that have families to support can’t afford this option.
Now, I’m not saying that student teachers should get a full salary, but something would be nice. I busted my ass in the classroom for a year, then worked at night. If I didn’t love being in the classroom I would have ditched it a long time ago. Why do unpaid work for a year when you can get a job somewhere else where you get paid right off the bat?
Now, I don’t know about other states, but in California the cost of living doesn’t lend itself to being able to student teach for free. I consider myself a good teacher because I’m passionate about it. But, I wouldn’t have even had the option to go through what is basically an unpaid training program if i couldn’t live with my parents at the time. Of course I felt pathetic, but it was really the only way.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Another reason why some big school districts refuse to endorse pre-scripted lesson plans even for new teachers, and insist that new teachers concoct their own lesson plans, is that they’re hoping that somebody will someday come up with something that finally works.
And by “works,” I mean to accomplish the essence of the Kennedy-Bush No Child Left Behind act: closing the racial gaps in school achievement.
No public school district with a statistically significant number of students of each race has ever achieved this federally mandated goal. But nobody can admit that it’s probably not achievable. That would mean the Evil People were right.
So the search churns on for The One, the teacher out there somewhere who will hit upon the perfect method for eliciting the equal outcomes that we all know a priori must be possible.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:48 pm
An alternative is to reform teacher certification programs so they don’t drive out non-brain dead teacher candidates.
Matt, for example, wouldn’t last two weeks in a typical teacher training program because the illogical Ed-School articles he’d be assigned would drive him insane with their vapid idiocy.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Is it still true that we would have to increase teachers’ salaries by, on average, $18,000/year to bring them to the level of all those nations we always seem to fall short of in the classroom?
I’m not sure that’s enough given our social variety but I do know it is absurd to expect our schools to retain highly qualified teachers to deal with even our most difficult youngsters for salaries they can easily exceed elsewhere.
After all we want teachers not nuns.
And there are some problems where at least part of the solution, often the biggest part, is throwing money at it.
Then we need to lose the notion that it is our schools’ job to educate as opposed to providing really good opportunities to learn.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:53 pm
You are certainly right about this. We need excellent teachers in classrooms, no matter which route they took to get there.
The problem is there isn’t really a great way to predict the future success of a teacher – how or when they were trained, and years of experience don’t seem to correlate all that strongly with students’ performance.
Real reform will happen in education when innovative ways of measuring and tracking teacher performance are discovered. Those that can achieve dramatic academic growth among their students should be rewarded appropriately, while those that can not are influenced to try other professions.
The problem is this involves testing students frequently and evaluating teacher performance – neither of which is very popular with the powerful teacher unions that for have so long dictated educational policy.
Recently, however, there have been a number of reform-minded Democrats willing to serve a different constituency than that of the unions — the students. This does not go over well with all Democrats, as clearly seen in the background during Obama’s SOTU speech. For the sake of our children and our country’s future, I hope Obama pushes for radical change. Your voice will certainly help the effort, Matt.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Tony points out another good reason for MORE mid career and retired professionals to go into teaching, the money. Presumably, someone that has just retired out of another career could more easily accept the burden of working for reduced or no wages while they did a classroom apprenticeship, and took those essential classes in education.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Steve Sailer:
Wouldn’t you agree that truly closing the racial gap would require a financial and political commitment that goes far beyond NLCB?
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:58 pm
The teaching profession needs to be fundamentally re-imagined, but I don’t see think throwing a lot of inexperienced teachers at the problem is the solution. Unfortunately, enthusiasm does not make up for the lack of skill. At least two of my three kids had “lost years” in elementary school because of new teachers, one of whom had gotten very good by the time my third kid had her five years after her first gig with my oldest.
I think it might be helpful to flip the conversation. It’s not just that the profession expects completely inexperienced first-year teachers to do the same job as 10-year veterans, but it’s the other way around too. In what other profession do the 10-year pros do exactly the same work as entry-level newbies?
In almost every other profession, with greater experience and skill come greater responsibilities or other advancement. Lawyers become partners and take on bigger cases; engineers become project managers and design or oversee bigger projects; doctors become department chairs or open cash machines like MIR centers. With teaching, the only advancement is, literally, out of the profession into administration, and there are precious few of these spots.
It’s not just about the money — which is why I don’t think merit pay, by itself — does the trick. It’s about allowing the good professionals to grow in their jobs.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:01 pm
“Wouldn’t you agree that truly closing the racial gap would require a financial and political commitment that goes far beyond NLCB?”
It was tried in Kansas City for a couple of decades, where a judge mandated billions extra public school spending to close the racial gap?
How’d that work out?
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Jason,
I agree that testing is important to make sure students are learning, and standardized testing is important to compare different schools, but testing students frequently is a problem. If tests are important, schools will prep for them. Prepping for tests isn’t teaching. Giving tests isn’t teaching.
How much of the school year do you want to spend preparing for and administering tests?
I agree with you that school districts need to have ways to evaluate teacher quality and student achievement.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Yes, exactly. This is another feature of teaching that contributes to the transitory nature of the profession.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Seriously, Matt…whenever you make one of these posts, you simply assert that certification has no effect on teacher effectiveness without providing any evidence.
When other people, such as myself, provide evidence that your claim is false, you just write another post that makes the same tired and (apparently) refuted claim.
I am really beginning to wonder whether you are engaging in good faith on this issue.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:07 pm
money and incentives for good teachers to enter minority dominated schools would absolutely help close the gap. Do you guys have any idea how many teachers leave those schools because more affluent areas provide a better work environment?
Also, it comes down to home environment. Often if the parents have less than a college education they don’t emphasize education at home….it’s a wretched cycle.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Lots of misinformation here and a couple of points that are missed.
By way of disclosure, I’m a 2nd year science teacher who entered the profession at age 44 after a 15 year career as a marine scientist for the national marine fisheries service. My wife’s career brought us from Alaska to Texas and I gave up a government science job to start teaching HS science. I did so by going through a local alternative teacher certification program here in Texas, which I thought was quite good. Although it was through a local community college, the coursework and professors were as rigorous as I experienced at Reed College where I did my undergrad and at the University of Washington where I did my graduate work.
First of all, everyone should understand that alternative teaching certification programs do not exempt anyone from meeting the educational requirements for a teaching certificate. For example, if you are going to teach HS science here in Texas you need the same number of college hours in the various science disciplines whether you go through a teacher ed program or an alternative cert program. The only real difference is how you pick up the education theory classes. In a traditional program you pick them up as an undergrad. In an alternative cert program you pick them up through the program.
Second, look around your own state or region and count the number of decent colleges and universities, then count how many of them actually have traditional teacher education programs. I’m willing to bet that it is a fairly small percentage. By restricting teaching to those who go through traditional programs, you are eliminating from the profession, anyone who chose a non teacher college out of HS. Does it really make any sense at all to tell someone who is attending a top private college that “Oh? you think you want to be a teacher? Better transfer to your local state teacher’s college then so you can get those critical education theory classes. Studying Chemistry/English/History etc. at Harvard/Swarthmore/Stanford etc. is all wrong if you want to teach High School. What you really need to do is transfer to your local overcrowded and underfunded state teacher’s college.
In my own case, I had a BA in Biology from a good liberal arts college and a MS in marine science from one of the country’s top graduate programs in marine sciences. And I had worked as a field biologist and fisheries manager for 15 years. Should I have gone back to undergraduate school at my local teacher’s college to pick up a second BA in education to become a science teacher? Or, perhaps was it more appropriate to pick up the education theory classes that I was missing and get into the profession that way?
Point being, don’t confuse alternative certification (at least in my state) with lack of certification. Of the 20 science teachers in my large public HS, 5 of us are alternatively certified. Myself, a former industrial chemist, a former nurse, and two former medical lab technicians. And we have by far the more experience in real science than the traditionally certified teachers who started teaching science at age 23 straight out of college.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Schools can’t close the racial/achievement gap, just like doctors can’t end American obesity.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Matt should spend a couple of weeks in a teacher training program and then write a magazine article about it.
Matt, with his love of logic, would be driven nuts by the inanity of what he was force-fed in teacher training courses, the constant invocation of Occam’s Butterknife.
But, it’s really not the fault of the Education Schools that so much of their output is self-evident drivel. Society has assigned them an impossible task. All respectable members of society (such as Sen. Kennedy and President Bush, who combined to write the No Child Left Behind act) assert that the racial gaps in school and life achievement can be eliminated. Any respected person who public doubts this is excommunicated (such as James D. Watson, who went from America’s most prominent man of science to outcast overnight).
So, the Ed Schools make up a lot of stupid stuff and indoctrinate new teachers in it. Thus, the mental atmosphere of teacher training is one of Crimestop, which Orwell described as:
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:24 pm
2LT is an interesting case. They will not have nearly
the responsibility of someone who has been an officer for ten years (CPT/MAJ) but they will have more responsibility than their SFC who has been enlisted for 15 years.
Maybe school districts that rely on a large number of non-certified teachers need to create a “non-commissioned educators.” They wouldn’t actually teach but instead sit in on classrooms and provided advice and counsel to all the newbies.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Steve Sailer:
1. Why is eliminating the racial gap an impossible task?
2. How did you get the data to support your characterization of ed. schools’ teacher training programs?
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
“I do know it is absurd to expect our schools to retain highly qualified teachers to deal with even our most difficult youngsters for salaries they can easily exceed elsewhere.”
Is this true anymore? I live in Pennsylvania. A few of my cousins just graduated from college with ed degrees. They make something close to $40,000 a year straight out of the gate.
That seems pretty reasonable.
All of them also manage to make extra cash by coaching, and by taking on work over the summer, pushing thier total annual take to something like $50,000.
What would be a reasonable amount? Maybe $75,000? Sheesh.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Sam M,
yes it’s true. Starting teachers here in California make about 40,000 grand as well. I live in a dingy apartment in Hollywood and I’m able to get by on my teaching salary…barely.
And 75 might be a reasonable amount. Why is it that so many teachers get all bothered when teachers claimed they’re underpaid? Most people have no idea how much work really goes into it…and really, isn’t it pretty damn important to be responsible for the education of our future generations?
I’m not attacking you, so sorry if it comes off that way. Teaching is one of those “don’t judge it till you try it” things…
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Because black people are deficient in IQ, in inverse correlation to their penis size.
This makes not good with abstract thought, but very good with sports, music, sex and violence.
I realized this when my wife was gangbanged by three black men. They forced me to watch and play my banjo, and my wife had to bang a tambourine, which was very painful for her since her legs were behind her head.
The black penises slid in and out with perfect rhythm.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Yeah, yeah, yeah. As we can see from the phony message above a perfect example of Crimestop in action: “being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Stop using Orwell Steve, please; he would be disgusted.
Do you play the banjo?
March 3rd, 2009 at 6:00 pm
For 45 years, the Ed Schools have been like the biology departments at Creationist Bible Colleges: assigned to prove a dogma that just isn’t true. So, Ed Schools drive away people with intellectual self-respect. Thus, Matt wants smart people to be able to parachute into teaching jobs without undergoing the soul-crushing experience of being lied to for years at Ed School.
But why not reform the Ed Schools?
Education is too important to be left to the Ed Schools.
Lots of non-Ed School social scientists have made substantial contributions to our quantitative understanding of education, such as James Coleman, Christopher Jencks, Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, and so forth. But who have Ed Schools produced? The innumerate Howard Gardner?
About 1975, Solzhenitsyn offered a deal to the Politburo — Don’t give up power, just give up your ideology. The Politburo didn’t take him up on it, but a few years later the Communist Chinese did. And they’re still in power.
So, here’s a proposal for the Ed Schools: just give up your dogma. Instead of spending another 45 years trying to square the circle of racial equality, adopt a new mission: trying to help each individual student come closer to achieving his or her own potential.
March 3rd, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Steve,
I have an education degree, and my biggest criticism of their approach is probably the same as my biggest criticism of yours: they use testing data (achievement rather than aptitude) as the only criteria for evaluating methods. Also, can I ask again why it is you think that blacks will never achieve on the same level as whites?
March 3rd, 2009 at 6:47 pm
The Richmond City Bailout of the WCCUSD:
Like Putting a Band-aid on Gangrene
By Charles Rachlis February 7, 2009
A palpable wave of relief passed through the crowd during the February 4th meeting when the representatives of the City of Richmond announced their bailout of four schools potentially slated for closure. While not looking a gift horse in the mouth, however, the community understands that one-time bailouts from the cities won’t put the WCCUSD in the black. Without a commitment for another two million dollars from somewhere, prior to February 11th, the school board sees no road to a balanced budget other than closing the doors of a number of our neighborhood schools.
To make matters worse, California Secretary of Education Jack O’Connell has announced that ten billion dollars will be cut this year from state payments to the school districts. Because of the state budget stalemate, the Governor has threatened to shave five days off the school year, and plans to lift state restrictions on how school funds are spent, freeing our school board to use state money to pay debts instead of funding education. So even if the City of Richmond money holds off some of the closures temporarily, we will be back in the same position before long.
Thirty years following the passage of Proposition 13, the simultaneous impact of a California budget crisis rendered intractable by the two thirds majority rule, and the worldwide breakdown of financial institutions, has created a perfect storm raining debt and empty promises on our children. This crisis appears to be unrelenting, unstoppable, and beyond the ability of the best and brightest to solve. All the institutions of democratic governance, from the lowly school board to the state legislature and the mighty senate of the United States, are incapable of addressing the concerns of working people and the needs of our children.
Rather, these august institutions are poised as one to enforce the greatest wealth transfer ever from the working class to the elite. Cutting schools is only one of the ways the working class is being forced to bear the burden of fiscal mismanagement and unrestrained wealth appropriation by the elites. The elderly, the uninsured, the unemployed, subprime mortgage holders, state workers, the disabled, and the indigent have all been abandoned along with the students. Millions have seen their life savings and retirement or pension plans wiped out.
The safety net has been shredded, and the specter of a full-fledged depression looms over the economic forecasts. The promoters of deregulation, tax breaks for the rich, and unrestrained markets, who during the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush years promised unending prosperity, have been exposed as the self-promoting hucksters that they are.
The federal government has shown that its first loyalty is to the very bankers, speculators and war profiteers who brought the growing economic crisis to its inevitable head. The bailout of the banks in October 2008 was opposed by the grassroots, who flooded their representative with phone calls and e-mails. Against the better judgment of the American people, the bailout passed in two short weeks – with bipartisan support, and Obama’s blessing. Four months later, it has been revealed that not only did the bailout not work, but in addition, millions of bailout dollars were used to pay outrageous bonuses to the very speculators who fueled the economic meltdown. Despite the proof that the bailout was a failure, which will result in lowering the worth of the dollar and incurring debts our grandchildren will be paying for decades to come; the current administration has refused to stop the bank bailout disaster, and is poised not only to release the second half of the money to the banks, but also to institute a new plan to buy their “toxic assets,” shifting the risk of loss from the bankers to the taxpayers. In response, working people around the country are asking, “Where is our bailout?”
When working people lose their jobs, their homes, their health care, and their schools, the economic elite, the pundits, and the government either ignore their plight altogether, blame the victim, or pose and posture but provide no relief. Inversely, when the fat cats of finance destroy the economy, they are quickly bailed out by the average taxpayers, against their will. Rather than nationalizing the failed financial institutions, or letting the “free market” take its course, the elite deem the speculators “too big to fail.” At the same time, our children are deemed too burdensome to teach.
If cuts in social programs and education are not opposed vigorously, they will be made now, under the guise of the current crisis, and the funds will never be restored even if the economy recovers. Yet finding, printing, or borrowing money is no problem for politicians when their puppet masters in banking and big business deem it necessary. It all comes down to a question of whose priorities do the institutions of governance serve?
Working people can’t compete with the corporate elite in the effort to buy politicians. Despite the millions in small contributions to the Obama campaign, the biggest contributions were bundled by the corporate elite. Not surprisingly, then, the new administration is loaded down with bankers and speculators, including many of the same players who helped deregulate and bring down the system in the first place.
The working class has little recourse via the polite civic process of petitioning the government for redress. It will take a social movement unlike anything seen in this country for generations to defend and expand social programs and public education during this crisis.
However, we are not powerless to force a reordering of priorities. The working class has enormous power. We have the power to build roads, railways, planes, power and steel plants, auto factories, hospitals, and schools, and to teach the workers needed for these projects. We also have the power not to work. When we choose not to work, our real power is felt in the pocketbook of the business elite, as the profits they usually derive from our labor stop flowing. Our power not to work, if used to its fullest, can paralyze the economy and force the ruling class to meet our demands.
Strike action is the most powerful weapon in the working class arsenal. However, the leaders of our organizations have become too enamored of the corporate model; of their Democratic Party “friends”; and of the irrational and misguided belief that justice can be won in the bosses’ courthouse. Diverted by their illusions from their proper role, our union leaders refuse to prepare their membership for strike actions. Our organizations need to prepare the community for direct action up to and including mass demonstrations, student walk outs, teach ins, teacher strikes and possibly occupation of schools slated for closure.
Quality public education and an endless war economy are incompatible. Quality public education and a prison economy are incompatible. Quality public education and government dominated by corporations, bankers and speculators are incompatible. Once we recognize the problem and the obstacles, the solution becomes self-evident. When we come together as a community of working people, and forge organizations based on solidarity and democracy, there is no force that can withstand our power.
Consider the WCCUSD. The school board does not answer to the parents, the teachers, the school staff, the students, and the community. It answers to the Trustee, who in turn is an unelected bureaucrat accountable only to the agents of the ruling elite. The school board’s response to the financial pressure has not been to fight for the interests of the students and their teachers and parents, but to close schools and reduce programs, balancing the District’s budget at the expense of our children’s education. If our schools were controlled by the teachers, staff, and parents, who are intimately connected with the students and their educational needs, instead of politicians and bureaucrats, we would be working to find a way to keep the schools open and flourishing rather than trying to con the community into accepting the closures as inevitable.
No to school closures
No teacher layoffs, no cuts by attrition
Fill vacancies, restore cut programs, reduce class size
Restore quality education; bring back music, art, and sports
Hands off staff and teachers’ wages, benefits and retirement
Place schools under direct teacher, parent, and staff control
March 3rd, 2009 at 7:09 pm
“Also, can I ask again why it is you think that blacks will never achieve on the same level as whites?”
Because the average black IQ is one standard deviation lower than the average white IQ.
March 3rd, 2009 at 7:22 pm
And it’s hard to have good schools without good teachers.
This is in fact untrue. Actually it is hard to have good schools without good students. People define good schools as schools in which the students do well on standardized tests of academic achievement. Given this if you want to know if a school in the United States is good you should look at the students, looking at the faculty tells you little. A school with a student body from the top 10% and a faculty from the bottom 10% will appear to do well, a school with a student body from the bottom 10% and a faculty from the top 10% will appear to do poorly.
Trying to improve schools by fiddling with the faculty is like trying to improve gas mileage by making the roads smoother, in the US this would make little difference. Your small cars are still going to get good mileage and your SUVs are still going to get poor mileage because the quality of the roads doesn’t matter much compared to the differences between cars.
March 3rd, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Sam,
$40K ain’t that great for a college grad, plus what do they make after 10 years, 20 years?
March 3rd, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Because the average black IQ is one standard deviation lower than the average white IQ.
That’s the problem, yes, but it in no way answers the question of whether or why this difference couldn’t be erased.
Or do you honestly believe that the acerage black student in this country and the average white student have equal learning environments? Or do you think that after 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow, all opportunities magically equalized in the last few decades?
March 3rd, 2009 at 8:36 pm
What Adam said.
Steve? Bueller . . . Bueller?
March 3rd, 2009 at 10:11 pm
But, interestingly, the evidence suggests that there’s little correlation between the effectiveness of a teacher and whether he or she came through a standard certification program or one of the many “alternative certification” programs that exist around the country.
How about some citations of this evidence? I’ll give you some that say just the opposite.
Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd & Jacob L. Vigdor, “Teacher credentials and student achievement: Longitudinal analysis with student fixed effects”, Economics of Education Review, 2007, Volume 26, 673-682.
Donald Boyd et al., “How Changes in Entry Requirements Alter the Teacher Workforce and Affect Student Achievement”, Education Finance and Policy, 2006, Volume 1, Number 2, 176-216.
Linda Darling-Hammond et al., “Does Teacher Preparation Matter? Evidence about Teacher Certification, Teach for America, and Teacher Effectiveness”, Education Policy Analysis, 2005, Volume 13, Number 42, 1-48.
Ronald H. Heck, “Examining the Relationship Between Teacher Quality as an Organizational Property of Schools and Students’ Achievement and Growth Rates”, Educational Quarterly Analysis, 2007, Volume 43, Number 4, 399-432.
March 3rd, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Also, please name one profession where experience does not contribute to better performance. The idea that high turn over might be a good thing is silly on its face and would only be uttered by an ideologue pushing an agenda. Sorry MY. I generally like your blog, but you’ve internalized some serious right-wing narratives in regard to education policy. Do some research of peer-reviewed journals for crying out loud!
March 3rd, 2009 at 10:21 pm
61 62
It is implausible to believe the difference will be eliminated by improving schools because schools don’t actually make much difference.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:13 am
I don’t think that we can fairly assume that blacks have lower IQs than whites but at the same time, we have to acknowledge that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence supporting that conclusion and just assuming that sociological factors must somehow be responsible for the entire discrepancy and biological factors are responsible for none of the factors even though there is no evidence that this is the case is sort of strange. Steve seems too preoccupied with this theory but he is correct when he characterizes arguments against his assertion as either : pretty thinking makes it so. Or the water is muddy enough to believe what is most comfortable.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:55 am
“$40K ain’t that great for a college grad, plus what do they make after 10 years, 20 years?”
Uh… Yes it is. What planet do you live on?
Sure, if you are going to talk about engineers or computer scientists, those people get paid more. But generally speaking, people in non-quantitative fields have fairly low starting salaries. Know what a lot of the PhDs I teach with make at a major state university where I work? About $30,000 a year.
How much, exactly, do you think a psychology major makes upon leaving college?
My wife is a nurse. Her starting salary right out of nursing school was something like $20 an hour. People on starting on other units made a few dollars more. Some a few less. So, uh… about $40,000.
And as for 20 years into it, I know quite a few teachers who went on to get a masters (their school districts paid for it) and now make between $70,000 and $80,000 a year.
Listen. These people aren’t driving around in Ferraris. But that’s not exactly starving to death, either.
The idea that the pay sucks seems rooted in some reality established two generations ago. The people who I know who are teachers all admit that. They live in middle class neighborhoods, drive SUVs, send their kids to college.
Seriously. What do you want? And sure, I know that it’s a tired old argument to talk about the fact that teachers get three months off every summer and don’t work holidays. But it’s true.
I am not complaining about any of this. If I wanted to make $40,000 right out of college and have summers off, I could have been a teacher. I didn’t.
Maybe you did. So you have to deal with bratty kids and their parents. Whatever. I hope that was a good choice for you. Either way, $40,000 is a good starting salary.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:02 am
Also, please name one profession where experience does not contribute to better performance.
It’s not so much the profession as the job. If your job ceases to be challenging, they you’re not going to get any better at it. A cook can keep getting better and better if he or she has a job that allows them to grow. But a cook at a diner is probably going to hit a ceiling after a couple of years, and not make better french toast year after year.
I can see the same thing happening with a particular teaching job.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:36 am
“Or do you honestly believe that the acerage black student in this country and the average white student have equal learning environments?”
No. The average black student is more likely to be surrounded by other black students, and black kids are often disruptive. But I don’t think this is a huge factor though.
“Or do you think that after 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow, all opportunities magically equalized in the last few decades?”
The problem with this line of thinking is that American blacks actually have significantly higher IQs than blacks in Africa who didn’t have 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow to deal with. You could argue that colonialism depressed African IQs, but that wouldn’t explain why there are other formerly colonized people with high IQs (e.g., Hong Kong Chinese).
The reason for the IQ gap is moot, though; the point is that no one has been able to close it, and there’s no reason to think the latest educational fad will make a difference.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:45 am
I usually agree with Sailer when he comes in to crash the party, but racial differences are basically irrelevant in public education. The trouble with the education system is that its so damn inefficient. The Ed school constructivist dogma is far less effective for teaching basic skills than B.F. Skinner-style behaviorist methods that military trainers have used effectively since World War II.
Even if we accept Sailer’s point that minorities are doomed by biology to having lower IQs than whites, if underprivileged students are taught with effective methods like Precision Teaching or Direct Instruction (which are heavily scripted), they will outscore white students taught by the standard methods.
At Lewis Lemon … black third-graders outperformed white counterparts in reading and math in last spring’s tests; 97 percent of black students met state standards…Compare that to scores around the district: 41.1 percent of black third-graders, compared to 73.7 percent of whites, met state math standards.
http://www.illinoisloop.org/rockford.html
March 4th, 2009 at 11:53 am
First, I worked in a California state program (CAL-Soap) that provided intensive tutoring to K-12 black, latino, southeast asian, poor white, and rural kids and counseling to those kids and their parents, and year after year those kids not only outperformed the averages for students from their own backgrounds, but from all backgrounds. The kids we worked with, on a relative shoestring I might add, had year in and year out exemplary college enrollment and retention rates coming out of our program.
Secondly, teaching at all levels is a profession in which the workers are continually asked to do tasks that they are not given time to perform well in (if for example you are teaching 6 different classes for thirty or more students requiring daily lesson plans, when does one find time to grade papers in a manner that uses those performances as teaching vehicles or upgrade one’s curriculum to suit the never ending shifts in student learning styles, not to mention the inordinate amount of time invested in staying up to date in developmental psychology in order to achieve some sort of behavior management. Most people, when thinking of what a good teacher is seem to think sainthood for very little requisite renumeration. If doctors, lawyers, business professionals labored under similar conditions, there would be a big turnover there as well. Teachers have more to do with wealth generation than any other single group of labor professionals I can think of, and the populace thinks we can get by on paying them considerably less and giving them an impossible set of circumstances to work within.
Finally, perhaps this is just anecdoatal, but I am wondering how many reading this post can remember the great teachers they had, how many of those great teachers had been in the game only 3-4 years.
March 12th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
You make some good points above.
However, I also think that this can be helpful to you:
The book and Training Video: PREVENTING Classroom Discipline Problems
If you can get this book and video: [they are in many libraries, so you don't have to buy them] email me and I can refer you to the sections of the book and video [that demonstrates the effective vs. the ineffective teacher] that can help you.
If your library does not have them, you can get them at:
http://www.panix.com/~pro-ed/
that are also used at this online course:
http://www.ClassroomManagementOnline.com
See: Reviews at: http://classroommanagementonline.com/comteach.html
If you cannot get the book or video, email me anyway, and I will try to help.
Best regards,
Howard
Howard Seeman, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus,
City Univ. of New York
Prof. Seeman
Hokaja@aol.com