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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 Zz9zZ on Friday July 01 2016, @08:15PM
The money isn't going to better pay for teachers (which would help the 50% attrition rate in the first 3 years of teaching) or for more teachers. Well, some goes to hiring more special ed teachers and aides. One program threw millions of dollars to create an Olympic class athletics facility and as you can imagine it had zero impact on student achievement. People pointed to it saying that is proof that money isn't the problem. Meanwhile most schools have lost/decreased their "non-essential" programs like languages, art, music, shop.
Raising teacher pay would be good and would show that we value our children's future. However, a more pressing issue is class size. Most teachers have 30-40 students in each class, and it becomes impossible to give adequate attention to each student. However, hiring at least 2X more teachers would be very expensive and thus it doesn't happen. Since people don't value education it is easy for politicians and administrators to cut costs by increasing class sizes. It is stupid.
~Tilting at windmills~