If a sizable number of the secondary ed. teachers had majored in a technical subject, their scores would at least be above the mean. What I suspect (no evidence, just anecdotal observations) is that the high school teachers are somewhat more knowledgeable, and the math average is being pulled down by the 6-8 teachers.
You said your source was sorted by field. This means that the secondary school teachers who pursued graduate studies in education would show up in your stats under that column. The ones who majored in math would be counted under another column. My Algebra II teacher didn't have a master's in education. His was in math.
Given the basic levels of instruction involved, I don't expect a K-3 teacher to have much more than a high school education. There's no calculus involved in understanding place value.
I disagree. I think they need to understand what's coming in order to lay a proper foundation. Their lack of understanding is one of the major reasons for all of our problems. For example, they get easily taken in by fad curricula like Everyday Math. Etc.
Well, we're constantly adding to our knowledge and revising what we thought we knew, so maybe we should just stop teaching until we know everything that can be known, sometime after the year infinity.
Or, given the numbers of teachers needed to teach math in K-graduate school, if we limit the pool of teachers to those who can grok calculus, then we'll run out of people who can do things like engineering and research. No time for developing new energy sources or mapping genomes, because 2nd graders need to understand how to borrow and carry.
Or, maybe we can be a little more reasonable in how we allocate resources.
Whether teachers are easily taken in by fad curricula is not the point, because they're not the decision makers. They're not always even made by educators.
