Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Ignore ACT Reading and Science scores?

Do principals look for high Praxis test scores when hiring teachers, or do they ignore the actual scores as long as the candidates pass? In general I wonder how much emphasis schools give to academic achievement when hiring teachers.

Hi Kerripat,

Their scores were lowest on every table I've found. Check these reports from 2010, 2006, 2005, and 2002. Plus I have an old paper report from 1996. Click around on this site for detailed data on scores by major (ETS data). Add in the appalling Praxis tests and high failure rates on other pre-licensing tests, and there's an obvious lack of knowledge. It bothers me that people who state this fact get accused of picking on teachers. It's just a fact.


Yes, I agree --- but there are systemic problems that drive talented, knowledgeable people away from teaching. A big one is that no one is allowed to be promoted or given a pay raise or bonus because of excellent performance (see my earlier post). Good employees want to be recognized and rewarded for doing good work, and they'll leave a system that doesn't recognize their talents. If schools treat talented people with respect, they'll get better teachers.

Look at this data on math and science teachers from the NSF website:



Note that point about private schools: they attract the highest scorers. Yet they don't offer tenure, pensions are not as great, their classes are only two students smaller on average, and they don't pay as much (see this link at the Dept. of Education). If money is so critical (as has been suggested here and elsewhere), why is this? Also, private school teachers don't get criticized the way that public school teachers do. Why is this?

Just food for thought.

I doubt that reform is possible and suggest instead that education majors be abolished and that future teachers should have real majors (English, history, math, physics etc.) and a few courses in pedagogy. Thanks for the paper reference -- the abstract is below.

Grading Standards in Education Departments at Universities
Cory Koedel
University of Missouri
June 2011
Students who take classes in education departments at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in other academic departments. The higher grades awarded by education departments cannot be explained by differences in student quality or by structural differences across departments (i.e., differences in class sizes). The remaining explanation is that the higher grades are the result of lower grading standards. This paper formally documents the grading-standards problem in education departments using administrative grade data from the 2007-2008 academic year. Because a large fraction of the teachers in K-12 schools receive training in education departments, I briefly discuss several possible consequences of the low grading standards for teacher quality in K-12 schools.

This seems like data that would need to be broken down a bit farther. I have to wonder if most of the high scorers are working in prep schools, gifted academies, etc. My understanding is that private school salaries are less in parochial schools, but not necessarily in other types of private schools. Which private schools are attracting those high scorers?

As to why private schools might be able to attract teachers without offering high pay and good benefits.... I can think of several reasons; here are a few:

1) Many private schools don't require a teaching certification, so it is a teaching opportunity that is open to some who would have to go back to school in order to teach in a public school.

2) In urban and semi-urban communities, it is easier and less stressful to work in an environment where students and families toe the line or get kicked out. I'm sure there are many people who are willing to work for less pay, job security, benefits, etc. in order to avoid the challenges of working in a public school. It does not follow that you can attract people to public school for private school pay, because you are often asking significantly more of the staff members when they are working in a public school environment than in that lower paying private environment (note: I am comparing lower paying private to public; not all private to public).

3) People who want to teach particular types of learners are more likely to be attracted to private than to public. It seems likely to me that people with top subject expertise are more likely to choose private than public for exactly this reason. I've seen many teachers leave public education because they imagined college students in elementary bodies--not in ability, but in engagement. The variation in engagement in college setting, prep school setting, or other select setting is much less varied than in a public school setting. A teacher can focus much more fully on the content of what they teach vs. the method they use to teach. I think about the range of teaching styles I encountered in college. Some held me on the edge of my seat and I loved every lecture; some bored me to tears. I may have preferred one class to the other, but I accepted that the responsibility for learning was on me, regardless of whether or not I liked my professor. Except for in very unusual cases, no one would have dreamed of holding the professor responsible for my grades. Yet in a public school, lack of effort, engagement or preparedness is laid squarely at the feet of the classroom teacher.

I think that the primary reasons you don't hear the same complaints about private school teachers as you do public school teachers are pretty obvious:

1) Private schools aren't tax payer funded, so only the people who use the specific schools care about what happens there. By contrast, many tax payers see themselves as the direct employers of all public employees and will comment on their performance whether they have firsthand knowledge or not, and whether they have a child in the public schools or not.

2) Private schools are able to control for many (if not most) of the conditions that impact outcomes, whereas public schools are not able to control those conditions. It is easier to blame the teachers than it is to blame the conditions (which would be extremely expensive to fully address, if they could be fully addressed at all). In other words, many of conditions that people complain about in the public schools are attributed to teachers and private school teachers are protected from those conditions in the first place.

3) Test scores provide ammunition to use against public school teachers but are not reported for private schools unless the private school chooses to be part of the testing. Private schools who are struggling in any way are highly unlikely to make that public. Why would they?

I doubt very much that people who choose private school teaching over public school teaching are doing it because they don't want good pay and benefits or union protection. I suspect it has much more to do with the conditions under which they will be teaching, and I agree with previous posters that this is not going to change until the conditions become more attractive and/or both the compensation for the current conditions and the attitude of the general public changes significantly. I mean really, who wants to rush towards work conditions in which pay and benefits are getting worse, conditions are getting worse, and public bashing has become an art form?

I am not suggesting, by the way, that all critiques are bashing; just that it is a very difficult time to be a teacher given the near daily thrashing the profession has been taking in the media.

This could be a myth (look at this information about Kansas). Private schools can't operate without revenue, and can't just expel students for any reason. If you have evidence for overall lower expulsion rates at public schools, I'd be interested in seeing it.


You can hold a professor responsible for poor learning if s/he lacks knowledge about the subject s/he's teaching. That NSF paper, the SAT & GRE, the Praxis I, and other test scores show pretty clearly that many teachers in public schools lack knowledge (especially in mathematics).


This is a pretty sweeping statement with nothing to back it up.


Here's a comparison between SAT scores in public and private schools in northern California. The scores are higher at the private schools. So, no ammunition against the private schools there.

I found this information in 2-3 minutes. There has to be more out there. When I make a claim about something, I try to support it with evidence as best as I can.


1. Evidence please.
2. Much of what I've written here concerns the harm that union policies do. Specifically, pay raises are based strictly on seniority. Doing a great job at work is not a factor in pay raises. An environment that refuses to reward talent is toxic to many (or most) talented people. When possible, talented people who aren't recognized tend to leave the public schools, be they students or teachers.

With respect, all of the points you've made in this thread have been based on your own experience (making them anecdotal) or on your opinions. I've been trying very hard to support what I say with evidence.

It bothers me that honest criticism of schools and teachers is characterized as "bashing." It seems to me that this accusation is a way of deflecting attention from valid criticisms.

Criticism is necessary in any system. People criticize the government, politicians, civil servants, Microsoft, airline pilots, McDonald's etc. etc. all the time. Those critics are aren't accused of "bashing" with the frequency that critics of education policies are accused of it (e.g. "teacher bashing" turned up 5.4 million Google results; everything else was in the thousands).

I think that teachers (and school boards and administrators) need to ask, very honestly, why people criticize them. Yet I'm cynical about the prospects of this ever happening.

Val-
Jumping in late and without quotes but I wanted to say that I very much appreciate your analysis in this thread.

I am a school administrator and a former teacher. I also spent 3 years training new teachers. I have never worked in a union school, as all of my 12 years have been in a charter school. That means: no tenure, no seniority, no merit pay. Our pay scale is 4% lower than the neighboring district but because we do not pay union dues, it is nearly a wash. People often say that charter teachers work for less. That's simply not true in CA anyway. My teachers work hard to keep their jobs every year. We accept applications yearly and hire the best new candidates and let go of those that don't meet our standards.

Now- the teacher testing is abysmal. My anecdotal evidence- I have a BA in Foreign Languages from a private university outside of the state. Due to backwards credentialing rules, California would not "honor" this as subject matter competency in Spanish and Russian and allow me to teach, without two more years of undergrad at a CA university. Since I had a few courses in US history, I decided to take the SSAT and Praxis for a Social Studies credential instead.

At my test, more than half of the room was taking the exam for their THIRD time. Stories filled the lunch conversation about those who had also failed the basic skills test repeatedly. You can't even sign up without a BA or a BS- yet these potential teachers couldn't pass the basic skills test! Unfortunately, many of these teachers were already multiple subject (elementary) teachers looking to add an authorization to their credentials. They were already working with little kids!

I passed the first time and scored very highly (not tooting my own horn). I find this also absurd. I have many courses in US history and political theory. That's all- but the state says I'm fully qualified to teach Psychology, Economics, World History, Ancient History and Sociology and Anthropology. The only economics I remember is guns and butter in high school. I would destroy any class of students expecting an education in that!

I have since also passed two other state exams without prepping or studying but by mere educated guessing. I've learned that the testmakers are not brilliant either and they do not check for duplicity in the questions. So if you have a remotely decent short term memory, you just flip back two pages and find the definition of the multiple choice question you're trying to answer.

What's all this say about me? I'm a very good teacher, an excellent administrator and all of this is due to my own reading, researching, personal education and goals.

What's this say about teacher testing and credentialing? That it's basically a joke. There's no reason that you should be able to guess your way through a competency exam and score high enough (50-65% depending on the test, I believe) to pass.

Some criticism of public schools is warranted, but they are also being criticized for not preparing all students to go to college, which is a completely unrealistic goal, because lots of people are not smart enough to study at the college level. A quote from the NYT is an example of this lack of realism:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/n...t-to-these-students-at-jamaica-high.html
A Failing School? Not to These Students
By MICHAEL WINERIP
New York Times
July 3, 2011

...

Of course, it is possible that such seniors are the exceptions. As James S. Liebman, the Columbia law professor who developed the city report card, wrote in an e-mail: �Good high schools aren�t satisfied when just a few kids get into strong colleges. They aim for all kids to do so.� Education Department officials point out that the graduation rate at Jamaica has stayed at about 50 percent for years.

But it is also possible that the deck has been stacked against Jamaica High, that the 15 �worst� high schools have been packed with the students with the worst problems. According to an analysis by the city�s Independent Budget Office, these schools have more poor children (63 percent versus 52 percent citywide), more homeless students (6 percent versus 4 percent), more special-education students (18 versus 12). For 24 percent of Jamaica High students, English is a foreign language, compared with 11 percent citywide.

The �worst� high schools are sent the eighth graders who are the furthest behind: their average proficiency score on state tests is 2.6 out of 4, compared with 2.9 citywide, and more of these students (9 percent versus 4 percent) are over age, suggesting they have had to repeat grades.

This is such a good point and one I had not read or thought of.

As for the idea that merit pay is standard in all taxpayer-funded jobs outside of teaching--this is incorrect. My husband works for our city government and I just confirmed with him that while he does receive evaluations, they have no relationship to his pay and never have. When he gets a raise, it's because the city has determined that the market rate for his skills has increased, or because his union fought for it, or because of increasing seniority. He could be disciplined or fired for poor evaluations, but he does not get paid more for outstanding ones.

FTR, my husband's GRE scores were 790/790/790 (though it looks like that's not as rare as I thought, which actually makes sense to me). He is damn smart, but he stays in his relatively low-paid public position for a variety of reasons. It's very family-friendly (he's an extremely involved dad) and he derives personal satisfaction from the altruistic nature of the position. I guess the fact that I didn't even know if he could get a performance-based raise goes to show how much we focus on externally judged "performance" here. He judges himself (harshly, sometimes); some random superior's evaluation is secondary. I'm the same way. I don't rely on other people or even on money to tell me I'm making a difference or performing well.

He could presumably still stay in his job if he was receiving raises based on excellence. Plus, you're speaking anecdotally about one person and extending his experience to everyone else.

My point has been, and remains, that basing teacher pay raises on seniority and nothing else drives many talented people away from teaching while retaining mediocre ones. Just because some talented people stay doesn't mean that driving away the other ones and is a good idea. Nor is creating a system with incentives for mediocre (and worse) people to stay.

I never said that merit raises are "standard" outside teaching. Please don't try to manipulate what I say. I said that they exist in places like the US military, public universities (e.g. the tenure system), and the FBI. These organizations all suffer under the same constraints that the schools do, but promotions are merit-based.

Again, I can't understand resistance to rewarding people for doing their jobs well. Why is this so horrible?

Hi Again Val and Everyone,

Back from vacation! Here is a very interesting and entertaining youtube video about what motivates us at work. It's not about teaching per se, just business in general.



I also looked up my university's M.Ed. admission requirements. I found that the minimum GRE score required for all secondary content majors is 1000 combined verbal + quantitative, plus Math and Science must have a quantitative score more than 550 and English and Social Studies must have verbal greater than 550. These scores are slightly above the average score on the GRE for education, and so I'm thinking perhaps that many of those low scorers don't actually get into the programs and become our future teachers. I know that these score requirements still aren't very high, though.