My 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.
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