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

Even more depressing Val, is that from my experience, the lowest achieving teachers end up in elementary school! Since it's "just" kindergarten or "only" first grade, then it's preemptively easy to teach and requires little education.

I don't want average elementary teachers who are also average in the classroom. You may be average academically, but passionate, inspired and willing to admit when you don't know and go look it up. DS had one of these teachers in 1st grade and she was stellar. Some of his favorite interactions with her started with, "I'm not sure, let's Google!"

As a teacher and an administrator, I have consistently run into problems with teachers who are both average academically and as teachers but refuse to recognize that. They are the ones that cling to the desperate need to prove they are smarter than their students, tend to struggle with classroom discipline and bully their way into pop quizzes, absurd projects and long tests, just to say "Ha! I told you so!"

We need to pay them as much as they can earn in other fields. We need to vote yes on school bonds that fund building maintenance and repair. We need to support the great teachers that we do encounter. We need to show up in the classroom and be involved in our children's educations. We need to not blame teachers for everything that is lacking in our children's educations.

My parents were both teachers. I don't know if they ever took an SAT, and I don't know their IQs. I suspect they were both at least HG. Both had Master's degrees+. My dad went into teaching because he loved loved loved teaching. My mom went into teaching because she is an extrovert, and at the time she graduated from college women had few career options open to them in the sciences other than research. My mom who chose teaching as a second career went on to love teaching and was a great teacher - she was runner-up for teacher of the year in her state once.

Both of my parents were totally of the same opinion whenI went to college - follow your heart but whatever you do, pick a direction that woud lead to a career where you out earn a decent living and also have some respect. They highly discouraged us from choosing teaching.

polarbear

I'm going to disagree with you here. I don't think the primary problem is lack of support from parents or society or pay (it's definitely not pay). This little tool shows average teacher pay by school district in California. Teachers in my district (not an especially good one) average ~$69K per year. If you look at the list of 50 highest paying districts, there are a lot of teachers earning over $76K per year in California. Sorry, but when you throw in benefits and all that time off, calling these people "underpaid" doesn't seem reasonable --- especially considering those very low test scores.

I think we have to raise standards. Plus, the working environment has to change so that it's attractive to smart, ambitious people. I have a very talented friend who left teaching in disgust after ten years. She was fed up with raises being based only on seniority, which meant that she couldn't be rewarded for doing a good job (sometimes she was actually punished for doing a good job because of politics).

Yet teachers unions resist ideas like subject assessment and raises based on performance. I've heard complaints that allowing performance pay would subject teachers to the "whims" of principals --- as though no one else in the world has ever had to deal with a less-than-ideal boss, and as if this would never happen in private schools. I'm even more tired of this excuse than I am of the one noted above that rationalizes lack of knowledge.

To clarify, by "raising pay" I meant that you have to make salaries equivalent or better than the salaries the people you want to employee will make elsewhere. My dh and dI both had great SAT scores and graduated from highly respected engineering colleges. We, and our colleagues, some of whom would love to teach and would make great teachers, make a heck of a lot more money in the private sector than we could ever make teaching.

I'm not saying you want to reward mediocre teachers with higher salaries, but what you need to do is raise the salaries to attract the caliber of teacher that you are able to attract and retain. In the private sector, if a company sets their salary bar below competitors, they will lose all but the most loyal of employees to other companies that pay higher salaries. Same reason a lot of very highly qualified potential teachers choose to pursue other careers.
polarbear

Some of the most talented people around go into research science, where postdoc salaries start somewhere around $38,000 per year in year 1 and go up to $52,000 per year after 7 years on the job. So, after a BA, maybe an MS and PhD, they're willing to work their butts off 12 months of the year for a lot less than a teacher who got 380s on the GRE who gets three months or more off.

And scientists have no guarantee of finding permanent employment in academia. But if they do, they'll work even harder and will be assessed via grants and publications. Yes, there are problems with that system, but assessment --- especially via publications --- is an excellent way to set standards. This doesn't exist with teachers.

If teachers want to earn the kinds of salaries that software engineers get, they'll have to agree to being assessed first, and the quality of the teacher pool will have to jump dramatically. Somehow I doubt that engineers who scored 380 on the quantitative part of the GRE are pulling in $100K per year.

Mediocre teachers should get mediocre salaries. But...

If you're making this argument for highly qualified people, I agree! By this I mean, people with degrees in the subjects they want to teach (and a graduate degree in the subject for high school teachers), maybe with combined GRE scores over 1400, enthusiasm, and an ability to impart information. By all means, hire these people, pay them well, and reward them for doing a good job!

I am going to suggest that raising teacher salaries will do little to nothing to increase the intellectual quality of the teacher pool until the actual working conditions and supervisory practices are brought more into line with those appropriate for highly intelligent people. I know a few highly gifted individuals who went into teaching, loved the actual "teaching kids" part of the job, and left the field because of the way they were continually mistreated by administration. They all said that there was no amount of money that would make up for continually being treated like an idiot who had no choice but to accept whatever arbitrary and unreasonable garbage the administration dished out.

And this would be how I ended up majoring in engineering in undergrad.

Not that I ever wanted to be a teacher, but I kind of got thrown into engineering by my parents.

My wife is currently annoyed that she *doesn't* have a teaching degree. She's currently a SAHM who would be quite content teaching.

Anyhow, why are we worried about the GRE when that's for people who already *have* a teaching degree and are looking to get an advanced degree?

As a teacher myself, I would like to see us pay starting salaries for new teachers that are higher. Sure, the average teacher may make 69K in some CA districts, but in my CA district, that takes 17 years. With a bachelor's degree plus one year for your credential, you will start between $35 and $38K. That doesn't include the significant amount that beginning teachers spend to stock their classroom and buy supplies the first two years.

I would also propose that it should be significantly easier to get a teaching credential for those that have numerous years of work experience in their field. I had a fantastic candidate apply for a high school science position. The candidate had been teaching at the University level, held a Ph.D. in his field and was really looking to inspire a love of biology at a younger age. I could not hire him because he didn't have the "correct" units. He needed to go back to college for another year to teach high school. That's just absurd public policy.

Late to the conversation, but I wanted to address the difference between teachers with "degrees in their fields" and those with "degrees in teaching." That is often an argument made by those outside of education to claim that those with degrees in their fields have much more content-knowledge than those who have education degrees. The perception is that a teacher who has a degree in secondary mathematics education pretty much took a bunch of teaching classes with a few math classes sprinkled in there (but probably nothing much more advanced than Calculus). However, if you actually LOOK at the college courses that secondary education majors take, the "content" classes usually differ by only six to nine credit hours (so two or three classes). The main difference between someone who majored in "mathematics" and someone who majored in "mathematics education" is NOT how many 300 and 400-level math classes they had to take -- it's the electives. If I major in "mathematics," I can choose from a large number of electives (my non-math classes). However, those who major in "mathematics education" have their electives taken up by their education/pedagogy classes. So, a mathematics major and a mathematics education major may sit in the EXACT SAME math classes for four years (Calculus III and other advanced math classes that go well beyond anything a secondary math teacher would be required to actually teach in a high school setting)...but while the mathematics major is taking whatever random electives she wants to take the rest of the day, the mathematics education major has to go to classes related to education (math pedagogy classes...technology in education classes...practicum classes with supervised "real classroom" teaching experiences...special education classes...etc.). So, be careful about assuming that anyone with a secondary education degree is inferior to those with content-area degrees in terms of content knowledge at the collegiate level.

I appreciate your insight. But this is not even remotely true.

I majored in math at a Tier 1 public university and ranked 2nd in the 20 math grads in my graduating class.

Here is my perspective.

At the end of the day, Calc III is still just fancy arithmetic. In most math departments, Calc III is something you were expected to have taken in high school. In fact, many math majors today take it while freshmen in High School. And in the top math programs in public schools that prep their students to do it, Calc III is covered in the 10th grade.

The number of students in my college's math department relative to the student body was very small. We had 5-10 students in the first year math courses, like Analysis and Abstract Algebra. Compare this to the 100 or so engineering majors in similar courses as Freshmen. The first and second year math major classes often had other students in there from other STEM majors. These were seniors or grad students and they routinely got C's or just dropped the classes when they saw how hard they were.

None of the students in the math department were there for secondary education teaching certification. Some did go on to teach, but as TA's and then later as college professors.

When the math majors took electives, we took upper division courses from the other STEM departments. I tested out of the usual electives and many core courses when I entered college - stuff like biology, geology, English I and II, etc. I took Orbital Mechanics, Quantum I and II, Thermo I and II, Computer Algorithms, Biostatistics, and some EE and Grad Math courses. I also took immersion courses in one foreign language and upper division classes in Greek. My last three semesters I carried 20+ hours. Due to my math preparation, the STEM upper division classes were easy and I had the highest grades in those classes. And on the side, just to get them out of my math advisor's hair, starting as a Junior and just for fun, I worked with PHD biology candidates and their professors on statistics problems and did QA on papers being submitted to top journals.

I do not think my experience as a math major from a good college prep HS who attended a major university was unusual.

let's compare that to a typical top flight math teaching program.

Looking at the top MAT programs ( "Master of Arts in Teaching: Mathematics" ) I do not see that MAT grads are REQUIRED to take even the Freshman level math classes.

http://www.stonybrook.edu/spd/graduate/matmath

Looking at this MAT program, only nine semester hours of "math" are required (after a survey course) and can be chosen from such classes as Algebra "for teachers", Geometry "for teachers", and Probability and Statistics "for teachers". Only two classes look remotely like college math major classes.

Clearly, MAT grads do not take ANY classes a real math major takes.

To make an analogy, comparing a MAT grad to a BS in Math is like a JV HS football player vs a first round draft rookie in the NFL.

In sports in the US, top freshmen prospects are taught by the top coaches in the HS Sports and they spend summers training at special camps. There is a full certification program for coaches, almost all of whom were top players as well.

But, for our top STEM kids, they send out people who have "math teaching certs" whose highest college math classes were Algebra and Geometry. And to top it off, the MAT grads think they know math.

Anyone wonder why education stinks and why many GT kids resent education? This is why.

Another data point.

A former boss of mine rose to the top of the corporate ladder then quit to raise her kids. She now teaches STEM at a smaller suburban school district. She teaches the honors math and physics courses from 9th to 12 grade. She has a masters in math from the same school I went to - along with an MBA. ALL of her students score 4 or better on the AP Calc exam every year. One or two students a year are really good at math and she does independent study with them on Analysis or Abstract Algebra and works with their college to get them college credit for it. THAT is the difference a real math major makes with merely bright kids.

GT kids need people who know real math to teach them math. Your typical MAT grad will be outgunned intellectually by the time a GT kid is 12. That means the kid will stagnate until they get to college.

This is why parents must check the CV of the higher math teachers at their schools. A hard degree of any kind is preferable to a teaching degree and a math degree is a must once Geometry is reached as Geometry is the first class with proofs.

This is how math should be taught at the secondary level.

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