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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, Informative) by urza9814 on Friday July 01 2016, @10:14PM
The problem is how that spending is distributed. Because when I was in school, my experience was pretty much the exact opposite of what you described. Every single school I attended underwent massive renovations while I was there...and none of the kids had a clue why because everything seemed to work perfectly well to us. Most of the upgrades for stupid crap like a massive sprawling gym/weight lifting complex that was literally about half of the entire building...for a small, fairly rural highschool whose sports teams would win one game every couple years. Or redesigning the hallways in case of a school shooting...in a town that maybe sees one murder every few years. The only incident they ever had with guns was when the cops shot and killed an unarmed homeless guy on the front steps in front of a bunch of kids. And they pushed through upgrades that *nobody* wanted -- like the fight over whiteboards. Administrators wanted dry erase boards to replace all the chalkboards in every classroom. The teachers almost universally thought that was a terrible idea. A few of the math teachers (since they're using the board all day long) actually scavenged the old chalkboards they were trying to throw out and put them back up. Of course, there were some good and needed upgrades -- like when they replaced all the Apple IIes in the computer labs, sometime around 2000 -- but most of the renovations seemed to be mostly about making the buildings look better. And even though every building I attended was renovated while I was there, and still under construction when I graduated, now only 8 years after I left that district they're starting yet another round of renovations! Some of which is for buildings that weren't done last time, but a few are being redone too.
But between the local college, the county seat and the hospital this was a town with a hell of a lot of doctors, professors, and lawyers. Since schools are funded by property taxes, they had plenty of money. And as far as I could tell they mostly pissed it away on frivolous garbage.
The problem isn't really that we spend too much, it's that the system is specifically structured so that some schools have more money than they know what to do with, while others literally can't afford to keep the lights on. We may spend a lot *on average*, but very few schools actually get that average level of funding.