[quote=CA renter]
There is a bell curve in every profession. Some teachers are Mensa (or even Triple Nine Society) material, and some are of average intellect. Very few are below-average because they all have college degrees, and most districts do look at college records and GPAs.
As for the Masters or PhD, some teachers have an advanced degree in their core teaching subject, especially at the secondary level. Others might have an advanced degree in education, with many of them specializing in a particular niche like curriculum and instruction (specializing in a particular subject like reading or math), special education, neuroscience/cognitive studies (especially how it relates to the learning process), technology in the classroom, administration, or school counseling (for those who want to move up and out of the classroom), etc.
What many people don’t understand is that how to teach is every bit as important as what to teach. A teacher with a Masters or PhD has studied different teaching methods and learned about the best ways to reach different types of students in different settings and situations.[/quote]
I agree that how to teach is probably more important that what you teach. Seriously any college kid should be able to know the material that is learned in K-12 education. Can they effectively teach it is a different question?
The problem in my eyes is the public school district does a really bad job at utilizing resources. For example let’s talk about the all-star mensa teacher that does it for the love of the job. At a high school level maybe 150 kids can be exposed to that teacher per semester under the current system. Thousands of other kids are not exposed to that star performer and a couple thousand more are exposed to the bottom 10% performers.
So now we have this star teacher that is likely teaching kids that could learn the material from any average teacher getting the advantage of learning it from one of the best. How do you get that star teacher into more classrooms. Why aren’t school district adopting and using technology to make that happen. If you could accomplish that successfully, you could give the star teacher a big raise and replace a bunch of the ineffectively classroom teachers. If I could prove massive increases in student performance by going down this path it would be rejected unfortunately.
That’s the fundamental issue. Public education and especially the representing unions isn’t about how to do public education better it’s about how to protect teachers and administrator jobs.
Fortunately we are finally seeing some investment in a better way of teaching content, i.e. the Khan Adamedy’s of the world. It’s likely inevitable that eventually better teaching technologies will make it into the classroom and replace the average classroom teacher but it’s not going to happen peacefully. You’ll have lower costs aides managing the classroom, with content coming from star content providers. Those aides might get paid petty well and they’ll have to do less work (grading and lesson planing will be centralized). There will be challenges and obstacles to overcome. Some kids might do worse in a system like this but I think it’s eventually coming.
