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

An ETS report "Teacher Quality in a Changing Policy Landscape:
Improvements in the Teacher Pool" http://www.ets.org/Media/Education_Topics/pdf/TQ_full_report.pdf has statistics on average SAT scores of teachers licensed in certain subjects.

According to Figure 20 "SAT Verbal Scores by Licensing Area for Those Passing Praxis Test" the average SAT-V scores in the period 2002-2005 for middle and high school teachers of academic subjects (math, social studies, foreign language, science, and English) was in the range of about 560 to 580, and Figure 21 shows average SAT math scores of about 570 and 590 for science and math teachers.

These scores are above the averages for college graduates (543 and 542 for SAT-V and SAT-M), but they are below what many gifted students achieve in 7th and 8th grade. I think students should have teachers who have more developed academic abilities than they do, which argues for accelerating into college courses students that are scoring in the 700s on the SAT-V and SAT-M. This assumes that the average scores of college teachers are higher.

That's law school, where you need a law degree, generally from a top institution. It's probably a safe assumption that they have relatively high SAT scores, at least on the verbal side.

He's talking about standard-issue high school teachers.

Hmm--where's that article I read recently about education in Finland? IIRC, teaching is better-paid and more prestigious there and it's much harder to get into teachers' college; presumably the teachers' test scores are also higher. The educational system is considered extremely successful.

I bet Bostonian wouldn't approve of the Finland system, though.

FWIW, I agree that a brilliant mind does not a great teacher make. In some disciplines, however, I suspect it helps.

Respectfully, I'm tired of the argument that being an expert won't make you a great teacher and lots of great teachers aren't brilliant. IMO, this is an excuse that teachers use to rationalize a lack of knowledge.

My five best teachers in HS each had degrees in what they taught - math, English, English, chemistry, and physics. If someone gets a degree in it, its almost a given they have a passion for it.

Its virtually impossible for a GT kid in HS to get anything advanced from a teacher who is not degreed in that subject.

This is why I now look at the degrees of teachers and the subjects they teach.

Actually it is the excuse I used to eliminate teaching as a career choice very early on. I was good at math. I majored in math early on.

I also suck at explaining math at people who don't intuitively grasp the concepts the way I did. I would be a terrible elementary school teacher, and *maybe* a decent (but not inspiring) math teacher in high school.

IMO the best person to teach a subject to the masses is the one who has struggled long enough to know which parts are hard, have had to explore different paths to understand it... and finally mastered it.

And +1 Austin, obviously. Teaching something you love/like (and not something you fear) is also key.

But experts can definitely be bad teachers, for the same reason that my DD was not a good "mentor" for the kids in her K class who didn't know how to read. ("What? You just...read it.")

I don't think this should be used to justify lack of knowledge, though. On that, we agree.

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.

Yikes.

I hope some of these people are merely majoring in education and will not become teachers.

I think average scores are...okay, for an elementary school teacher. I'd like to see higher for middle and high school, though. Well below average--that's a problem.

I have a Facebook acquaintance who teaches middle-school science. I am not kidding when I say that I have almost never seen a correctly spelled and punctuated status from her. ("I hate these kids there drivin me crazy oh wellll there gunna be gone soon!") I admit I find this scary and depressing. I was shocked to learn she had become a teacher (we worked in a kitchen together years ago) because, well, she really did seem pretty slow.

So how do we get the best and brightest to go into teaching? (It's not as if schools of education are turning down students with high scores in favor of those with lower scores.)

As an aside, as senior in high school planning to study education, with a GPA that had me in the top 2% in a very competitive H.S. and ACT/SAT scores that were probably in the top 5% (it has been a few years), I was asked by a teacher "Why would you want to be a teacher? You can do anything you want."

How many of us, with kids who are gifted, are encouraging them to go into teaching?