Val: I can't say tarring them all with the same brush is fair at all. Yes, my DD has had a couple of lousy teachers, and a couple of mediocre ones. She's also had a couple of really awesome ones.
Remember, I was speaking about teachers as a
group. I also said that there are very talented, knowledgeable people teaching. But the problem is that they're a minority.
The most recent average GRE score for education majors going into teaching is 150 for verbal (44th percentile) and 149 for math (37th percentile). These scores are at the bottom for all test takers. This story is the same, regardless of the year the data was published.
Average scores for future teachers are always at the bottom. Booklet with scores by major Percentile values for scoresI can't find averages for Miller Analogies, but it's easy to look up required scores for individual programs. Miller Analogies is seen as a decent-ish proxy for an IQ test. A score of 400 is average, and the SD is 25.
The Uni of SC's department of Special Ed. requires a minimum score of 388 for entry into its M.Ed. program (I found other parts of the education department with the same requirements). This means they're probably taking people with IQs in the 90s. Here's what they require at
Tennessee State:
Unconditional admission to the teacher certification program...requires the applicant to have a bachelor’s degree from an accredited four-year college or university, an undergraduate cumulative grade point average of 2.75 or better on a 4.0 scale, and a composite score of at least 870 on the verbal, quantitative, and subject portions of the Graduate Record Examination or a score of 370 on the Miller Analogies Test.
Conditional admission, for already licensed applicants, may be gained with a lower grade point average, but the GRE or MAT score must be correspondingly higher. If the undergraduate GPA is between 2.25 and 2.49, the GRE score must be 935 or the MAT score 383.
These requirements are TYPICAL.
So, sure, there are some bright and knowledgeable teachers out there. But the test scores and admissions requirements tell an important story: as a whole, the US teacher corps is not super-intelligent or super-knowledgeable. I honestly don't understand why people don't seem to be disturbed by this fact, and it bothers me that bringing it up garners unpleasant accusations about bashing. Nobody likes to talk about this problem but it's real and it's serious, and I doubt we'll make any meaningful progress with our schools in this country until we do.
