Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion SAT scores of teachers by subject taught

I was wondering about GRE scores for teachers during the same period.

I found a brochure produced by ETS that has detailed information about GRE scores by major for people who took the GRE between 2003 and mid-2006 (it's here).

Table 4 breaks down scores per hundred points and shows the percentage of people in a major scoring in each range. Results: 93% of aspiring education grad students scored less than 600 on the verbal section and 66.4% scored less than 600 on the quantitative. A score of 590 on the verbal was roughly the 83rd percentile, so basically only 7% of teachers scored at +1SD. But this is the good news. The math is more competitive (a perfect score of 800 was only the 94th percentile), but still, 590 was roughly the 46-47th percentile. So 2/3 of overall ed. majors scored below the average score.

A total of 31.3% of education majors scored 390 or less on the verbal test (a score of 390 was around the 28th or 29th percentile) and 15.6% scored 390 or less on the quantitative section (12th percentile). To put this in perspective, only 12.9% of studio art majors, 12.8% of English majors and 8.9% of religion majors scored in that range. True, scores were worse in some fields (Communications, Home Economics), but none of the majors in the worse-performing fields were planning on teaching mathematics. The mean scores of education majors were below average on both tests.

Added: I checked a booklet for students who took the test between 2004 and mid-2007,when some of those 2002-2005 SAT takers would have been taking the GRE (here). The numbers were worse.

The elephant in the room of education is that the majority of our teachers (particularly in the public sector; I've found before that scores are higher among private school teachers) are barely even average achievers, and many are below average. But if you say this out loud or outside of an little-read ETS booklet, you get accused of teacher-bashing. Stating a fact isn't bashing. It's being honest, and the problem won't go away until the quality of the teacher pool increases.