Johnny can't read? Janie can't add? Well, here's another reason why. - Granite Grok

Johnny can’t read? Janie can’t add? Well, here’s another reason why.

SchoolhouseMy feeling is that the most significant factor behind a student’s success in school are engaged parents.  I remember Mom having me sit at the kitchen table and watching me do homework AFTER she had gone over the material herself.  It wasn’t until I hit subjects like finite match, calculus, and programming and AP biology that she stopped ensuring that homework was done, done on time, and done right.  She did keep on reading my essays and tearing those up until they were rightly finished.

But it also took teachers that weren’t counting down the last years until retirement or clueless from the get go.  I had some great teachers, some that were characters, and some I hated simply because they were never satisfied and demanded more (and years later, I understood that THEY were the best of all).  The greatest will always be great regardless of their beginnings; the rest of us need to be trained.  However, it seems that those that train the students that teach our children are neither the brightest or best – an indictment of teachers programs all over; here is part of their Executive Summary:

…There’s no shortage of factors for America’s educational decline: budget cutbacks, entrenched poverty, crowded classrooms, shorter school years, greater diversity of students than in other countries. The list seems endless.

NCTQ’s Teacher Prep Review has uncovered another cause, one that few would suspect: the colleges and universities producing America’s traditionally prepared teachers.

Through an exhaustive and unprecedented examination of how these schools operate, the Review finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms with ever-increasing ethnic and socioeconomic student diversity.

…We strived to apply the standards uniformly to all the nation’s teacher preparation programs as part of our effort to bring as much transparency as possible to the way America’s teachers are prepared. In collecting information for this initial report, however, we encountered enormous resistance from leaders of many of the programs we sought to assess. In some cases, we sued for the public information they refused to provide. We anticipate greater cooperation for future editions of the Review, which will be published annually, resulting in more ratings for more programs.

For now, the evaluations provide clear and convincing evidence, based on a four-star rating system, that a vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars. These are among the most alarming findings:

  • Less than 10 percent of rated programs earn three stars or more. Only four programs, all secondary, earn four stars: Lipscomb and Vanderbilt, both in Tennessee; Ohio State University; and Furman University in South Carolina. Only one institution, Ohio State, earns more than three stars for both an elementary (3½ stars) and a secondary (4 stars) program.
  • It is far too easy to get into a teacher preparation program. Just over a quarter of programs restrict admissions to students in the top half of their class, compared with the highest-performing countries, which limit entry to the top third.

It is well known that incoming freshmen to these programs rank in the bottom half of their high school with respect to SAT scores – yet, Teachers Unions demand pay equal to that of other professionals even though they require higher entrance standards and more rigorous studies (and of course, much less vacation pay than what teachers get – even after decades of work).

  • Fewer than one in nine elementary programs and just over one-third of high school programs are preparing candidates in content at the level necessary to teach the new Common Core State Standards now being implemented in classrooms in 45 states and the District of Columbia.
  • The “reading wars” are far from over. Three out of four elementary teacher preparation programs still are not teaching the methods of reading instruction that could substantially lower the number of children who never become proficient readers, from 30 percent to under 10 percent. Instead, the teacher candidate is all too often told to develop his or her “own unique approach” to teaching reading.
  • Just 7 percent of programs ensure that their student teachers will have uniformly strong experiences, such as only allowing them to be placed in classrooms taught by teachers who are themselves effective, not just willing volunteers.

I am sure that there are teachers that are just born to teach and need, in some cases, only to learn the content – they seem to have the teaching skills already wired into their souls just as I know some self-taught programmers who can run rings around some computer science Ph.Ds. ‘Grok friend DCE of Weekend Pundit has told me the story of his upper management telling him to get a Ph.D so as to be the equal of the Ph.D.s on the staff where he works.  His normal, and utterly correct, retort is:

“Hey, I have 9 patents to my name and a bunch still yet to be approve.  All are related to products *I* designed that lots of customers buy. I already make you LOTS of money.  How about those Ph.D.s?  Oh, NO patents?  Wanna keep talking?”

 

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