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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: 2) by Thexalon on Friday July 01 2016, @04:35PM
And it's also useful to remember that when we say "university education", in the case of most teachers in the US that's a master's level education (and in a few rare cases you'll find doctorates), which means it's rare to have a teacher that's a complete fool.
I'm not saying there aren't foolish teachers out there, but usually the universities and education schools weed them out. And when they don't, they often get caught in their first couple of years when many union contracts allow bosses to fire teachers for incompetence.
How do I know this? I as a student was involved in having one of my teachers in her first year fired for incompetence, specifically for trying to teach chemistry without having sufficient grasp of mathematics to pass high school algebra. Which, as you might have guessed, is extremely difficult if not impossible. Especially after I demonstrated quite conclusively that what she was doing in one derivation implied that 2=1. How she got her certification I will never know, but that was the end of her time in the teaching profession.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.