This is a bit off-topic, but one of the graphs which surprised me this spring was drawn from
this paper on grading in ed schools. The graphs and tables are at the end. The education classes at the schools included in the study tended to give out higher grades, on average. The grade distributions are noticeably different.
I don't add it in here to bash anybody, my parents were public school educators, my kids' teachers have mostly been good to very good. But I feel a bit skeptical about education schools and education departments, I think we should be asking them to do a better job.
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.
