New Critique Of Teacher Ed

NEW CRITIQUE OF TEACHER ED

Report from former Teachers College president calls for sweeping changes in how and where future teachers are educated.

http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/19/teachered

 

This is a classic example of market forces at work: so long as teaching remains one of the lowest-paid professions, it will continue to attract the least prepared students, while the best and the brightest students go for better remunerating majors and careers.

 

Come on now I can understand Special Education Teachers, High School Teachers and maybe Middle School levels of education needing a bachelors degree. But face it under that its just not important and if your dealing with Kindergarden its able to be done by an associates degree holder.

If you want more teachers I say lower the standards according to what is NEEDED to teach at each level for youngest children an associates degree perhaps from grades K-4, an enhanced associates or bachelors for children in grades 5-8 and then require a bachelors degree or higher. Save Special Education which is specialized and does require special skills most of time teaching small children can be done by anyone remotely motivated. But come on now kids will either learn or not I figure if a child is to be educated that is the parents obligation to see to and they can be assisted by schools in that.

After all if schools are so good how come well-educated HOME SCHOOLED children often outperform them and foreign nations that spend LESS than we do have better educated children than those in the United States?

Money will not fix this its parental involvement, children wanting to learn and schools sticking to the basics right now it seems they are involved in things outside their duty to teach.

 

Not a bad postulation, but please back up your theory with statistics. "Well educated" home schooled students as a qualifier doesn't compare relatively to ALL public school students. "Well educated" public school students perform pretty well too. I'd be curious to see how ALL home schooled students (including those kept out due to primarily religious/idealogical reasons) stacked up in this case.

Parental involvement is important across the board, regardless of mode of education. How is improving quality of educator's pay and training a bad thing either way?

Dave

 

I never said ALL Home Schooling is equal if parents are devoted to teaching their children, make sure they do comparable lengths of time studying and they take the opportunities for involvement outside the home they do perform better. Then you have those that don't and there are quite a few of those I'm afraid. I should have selected my language better to make that clear. But there have been numerous findings

In the 1997 Galloway/Sutton study in five areas studied these academic, cognative, spiritual, affective-social and psychomotor and compaaring 60 home-schooled students and 120 from religious or public schools showed they scored higher on every area except psychomotor aptitude tracking them through college. And that includes home schooled persons from a secular background and there are a fair number of those.

Its also been demonstrated in a 1996 Act score evaluation home schooled children on the average scored 2 points higher than those of other groups. This has been demonstrated in other similar studies of College Entrance Examinations.

But I must add my premise it is necessary to educatate teachers based on the level of content and age groups to be taught. I see no reason for a bachelors degree to teach young children unless they are Special Education students. In most cases an Associates or an Associates plus Certificate would suffice in my opinion. This would increase the number of teachers and let those holding bachelors degrees or higher to be moved to teaching older children.