Fire Them!
By Christopher MooreMichigan is warning its teacher colleges that they better produce better teachers or else. The Detroit News has the story:
State officials want to crack down on state colleges to ensure they are preparing future teachers to meet the state and nation’s rising education standards.
Michael Flanagan, the state superintendent of public instruction, now plans by June to have a way to rate low-performing colleges and is developing a process to more thoroughly evaluate how well they prepare new teachers. State officials say the plans ultimately could mean taking away universities’ authority to certify teachers if, for example, they have too many graduates teaching in failing schools and too few passing certification exams.
This sure sounds like a good plan to me. If an education school continues to pump out bad educators, then they should be penalized.
But the state doesn’t go far enough. If the teachers these schools are producing are sub-par, then fire them!
Here are some interesting quotes from the article:
A 2005 report from the president of Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York found that nine out of 10 principals nationally felt that teacher graduates weren’t prepared, with many saying college courses lacked rigor and were outdated. About 80 percent said education schools were out of touch with K-12 schools.
I’ve attended education classes. They certainly do lack rigor. What’s more interesting is that an education professor will spend countless hours in the front of the classroom with an overhead projector explaining how you need to incorporate various methods into your teaching. Now this may not be the norm — my experience is limited — but from the anecdotal data I have collected (stories from about 1 dozen new science teachers), education classes in general are easy and incredibly boring. Are education classes important for aspiring secondary school teachers? Yes. Should they be better? Of course.
In Macomb County alone, officials estimate they’ll need at least 70 new math teachers over the next couple of years as more students are required to take advanced math.
This is actually a good sign. Requiring more students to take advanced math may be a sign that the culture of education is changing. Now if they would just take a look outside of the education schools to find these math teachers …
And here is an interesting problem:
Rachel Roth-Haverland, a high school junior from Royal Oak, said she’s felt the frustration of having a teacher who knew the subject well, but just couldn’t explain it to all students.
She dropped out of Royal Oak’s Kimball High School in January, in part because she became overwhelmed in her precalculus class. She said her math teacher tried to explain the concepts, even staying late after school, but just couldn’t connect with her.
“I felt like he was trying to explain Latin,” Roth-Haverland said. “It really lowered my self-esteem.”
I feel for Rachel. I also feel for her math teacher. Sometimes you can work hard and not succeed. I have never been very good with foreign languages. I would study for hours and I still managed to get a high C in Spanish and German. I’ve had students that worked incredibly hard in my physics classes, and just barely pulled Cs. I’m never going to be a translator, and those students of mine are never going to be physicists. And that’s ok. But we’re all better for having learned what we did manage to learn.
I think school districts should hire more high-school teachers with degrees in their subjects, and not worry as much about education degrees. But I certainly don’t think doing so would be a panacea.
Is it possible to be a good teacher without an education degree? Yes. But just because one has a degree in physics doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be a good physics teacher. Evidence of this can be found on just about every college campus. This is one of the reasons why teacher tenure below the college level is a pretty stupid idea. Whether someone has a degree in the subject they are teaching or not, they can still be bad teachers. So what’s the solution?
Fire them.
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