First the GRE scores and then the SAT scores.
The
Educational Testing Service published this report on GRE scores by intended area of study. The mean GRE score for Education majors was 981. This beat the scores of the following majors: Social Work = 892, Home Economics = 922, and Public Administration =962. With respect to the specialties with the Education faculty, the highest mean score was that of Secondary Education = 1060, and the lowest was for Early Education = 920.
As for the SAT I did read their statistical abstract but their search engine really sucks and I couldn't find it again without spending a lot of time looking through poorly parsed search results. So, I turned to web and found someone else who analyzed the results for the
SAT, but from 2003:
It's very important to always keep in mind that these are group averages and that individual students, teachers and professors could have had the highest of scores but we should also recognize that most folks don't fit into that category otherwise the means scores, and even the SD would reflect that.
I should note, that my experience deals with secondary education...
I agree that primary educators are not as educated/qualified,
and IMO, that brings down the stats against all educators...
Though, they do have their own talents that cannot be measured by a mere test...
They have talent in dealing with young children...
There is a psychological strength that they have,
and a good pre-school teacher is something to behold.
That said:
The average SAT verbal scores of prospective teachers passing the Praxis tests to teach English, science, social studies, math and art from 2002 to 2005 were higher than those of prospective teachers in the mid-1990s — and were also higher than the average SAT scores for all college graduates, the report said
The college grades of prospective teachers has also improved. About 40 percent of the prospective teachers taking the licensing tests from 2002 to 2005 had a grade point average of 3.5 or higher on the traditional 4-point scale during college, up from 26 percent in the 1990s, the report said.
The percentage of candidates earning lower than a 3.0 G.P.A. decreased to 20 percent from 32 percent
“By this measure, we are witnessing a dramatic improvement in the quality of the teacher pool,” the report said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/education/12teachers.html?_r=2&ref=education&oref=slogin
•Federal Title II reporting rules, which in 1998 required states and teachers' colleges to report Praxis pass rates.
• No Child Left Behind, which in 2002 forced states to expand teacher licensing testing, just as they were setting higher standards, such as minimum GPA requirements, for teacher education candidates.
ETS: Educational Testing Service ? Home
Teacher qualifications improve in the past decade - USATODAY.com
There was no problem at all in finding out that teachers, as a group, are far from dim. :lol:
40% have a 3.5 or higher...
Other things to consider:
The Art of Teaching. Teaching is more than simple knowledge in a field. It is balancing kids, emotions and such, along with classroom managment skills and curiculum and much much more. I know some "experts" in their fields, true experts, that have admitted that they could never do what I do. They simply don't have the skills to deal with the stress and the skills it takes to run a class and most importantly, the students in it.
How is the responsibility of a teacher to make unmotivated kids learn. I try daily, and many of these kids don't get motivated because they don't understand what a FREE EDUCATION can do for them. They are MTV / Cell phone / PS2 / IPOD spoiled brats! in many cases.
Every now and then though, you have breakthroughs... just the other day even. I had a kid tell me how school did nothing for him. He was kinda giving me that attitude and he had a few friends hanging about thinking he was being funny. I asked him what he wanted to do when he got older, he said own his own mechanic/race shop. I asked him how he thought that studying Immigration for a project with a small group for a research project might help... he said not at all. I asked him what he and his group were doing to complete the project. They started chiming in about who was doing what and how they were doing it, stuff that they did not get prior to me teaching them how to delgate tasks and work as a team and all that. They started seeing that school is not about the stupid knowledge that you are taught, it is about the lessons learned in how you approach these tasks and how they learn to think.
The kids started asking some questions, and I started talking to them about owning their the business that my wife and I have and how they might own their own businesses and the economics course that I teach. They got excited. Who knows? There was more to it than just this, but this is a glimpse of what some of our teacher haters just don't get.
