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from the those-who-can,-do,-those-who-can't,-teach dept.
In the US: this article presents an analysis how a person's chosen college major corresponds to their IQ. The interesting thing is that the relationship has remained essentially stable over the past 70 years. At the top of the list are math, science and engineering. At the absolute bottom of the list: education.
These data show that US students who choose to major in education, essentially the bulk of people who become teachers, have for at least the last seven decades been selected from students at the lower end of the academic aptitude pool. A 2010 McKinsey report (pdf) by Byron Auguste, Paul Kihn, and Matt Miller noted that top performing school systems, such as those in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea, "recruit 100% of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort."
The article points out that it isn't quite this simple: Top schools place high requirements on all of their students; poor schools generally attract lower quality students in all of their programs. Still, the national averages are clear: overall, the least intelligent students go on to teach. This is an odd priority.
Educational organizations, of course, have a different view. This article claims that teacher quality declined from the 1960s through the 1990s, but has since recovered, with teachers being barely below average (48th percentile) among college graduates.
On a related note, there is a strong international correlation between teacher pay and student outcomes. The (rather obvious) theory is that higher pay attracts better candidates to the teaching profession.
No conclusions - just thought this might spark an interesting discussion...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Friday July 01 2016, @02:59PM
At my school I had a lot of very highly qualified teachers.
At mine, I can only think of one: the teacher for the computer-related classes was a mathematician that worked for the government in some capacity, with a heavy computer background. He was retired and teaching because of a passion for computers and desire to teach others about them. His class was under-funded and still using 286's (while the school eventually got a brand new 'computer lab' of Pentium Pentium IIs only used by special ed), and the principal seemed to have a vendetta against him, but he kept teaching anyway.
I probably learned more from him than any math teacher I had, just as a side effect of how he taught his class.
He quit a year or two after I took his classes because the school decided computers were a waste of time and forced him to teach algebra instead. I remember him talking about how the pay wasn't worth it for anyone qualified to properly teach the subjects, and he lived primarily off saved funds or something. Once they took away the class, he had no reason to stay. Such a waste of a good teacher.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday July 01 2016, @03:03PM
(while the school eventually got a brand new 'computer lab' of Pentium Pentium IIs only used by special ed)
That should have been "Pentiums or Pentium IIs"; I don't recall the release date of the P2 so it could have been either. The systems were blazing fast at the time and wasted on dumb typing games and shit while they decommissioned the actual computer classes. :/