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[tolerantly]

Ahahahahahahaha.  You realize I saw this thread title and just started the belly laughing.

Here is my solution:

1.  Get all the ed majors and ed school teachers and ed-school-product admins into their respective buildings.  Be especially sure to get the pedagogy PhD people in there too.

2.  Encase said buildings in cement.

3.  Go to the heads of various university departments and industrial outfits, and say, "We're looking for very smart people who're good at explaining stuff to kids and enjoy it, and we're willing to pay them industry-level salaries to do this for a few years.  We also promise to more or less leave them alone to get on with the job, and give them time off to do their own work or research or whatever it is."

4.  Find and hire these people.

5.  Go to the IT people and say, "Find us the best K-12 instructional material you can and put it in a library online, sorted in the usual library way, but also make it very searchable and interconnected."

6.  Hire a bunch of helper types to take care of classroom admin tasks so the teacher doesn't have to bother with them.

7.  Hire very nice, gentle, articulate undergrads and TAs from subject areas to help tutor the kids recitation-style.

8.  Hand the teachers lists of what they're expected to teach.  Allow them to argue and improve on the lists.

9.  Ring de bell.

10.  If a kid is trouble, throw him the hell out.

11.  Bring back recess and let the kids run around a lot between classes.

Obviously that leaves out special ed, and you'd have to make some provisions for that, but for the vast majority of students, I think the above would serve them well.  The problem is not administration, yada yada, though certainly it doesn't help.  The problem is that most of the teachers neither understand their subjects nor care about them except in the most amateur, Highlights way.  Nor are they particularly bright.  Of course they can't teach, and of course they need classroom materials that all but move their arms and legs for them.  They don't understand the stuff they're teaching, and when it comes down to it they don't really want to, or can't.  If they had wanted to, and had been able to, most of them wouldn't have gotten onto ed tracks in college.

[studentaffairsed]

3.  Go to the heads of various university departments and industrial outfits, and say, "We're looking for very smart people who're good at explaining stuff to kids and enjoy it, and we're willing to pay them industry-level salaries to do this for a few years.  We also promise to more or less leave them alone to get on with the job, and give them time off to do their own work or research or whatever it is."

4.  Find and hire these people.

You hit the nail on the head here.

8.  Hand the teachers lists of what they're expected to teach.  Allow them to argue and improve on the lists.

So simple, why not let educators educate and use best practices?

11.  Bring back recess and let the kids run around a lot between classes.

Amazing how many elementary schools have actually had to do away with
recess in lieu of test prep or some other thing related to "raising" standards.

The problem is that most of the teachers neither understand their subjects nor care about them except in the most amateur, Highlights way.  Nor are they particularly bright.

That is a bit over arching.  Can it be too much intrusion into the daily classroom by political leaders, parents, etc?

[maries]

Ahahahahahahaha.  You realize I saw this thread title and just started the belly laughing.

Here is my solution:

1.  Get all the ed majors and ed school teachers and ed-school-product admins into their respective buildings.  Be especially sure to get the pedagogy PhD people in there too.

2.  Encase said buildings in cement.



Obviously that leaves out special ed, and you'd have to make some provisions for that, but for the vast majority of students, I think the above would serve them well.  The problem is not administration, yada yada, though certainly it doesn't help.  The problem is that most of the teachers neither understand their subjects nor care about them except in the most amateur, Highlights way.  Nor are they particularly bright.  Of course they can't teach, and of course they need classroom materials that all but move their arms and legs for them.  They don't understand the stuff they're teaching, and when it comes down to it they don't really want to, or can't.  If they had wanted to, and had been able to, most of them wouldn't have gotten onto ed tracks in college.

Hey, that's a joke that I just don't get, right?  (I'm a teacher, so not very bright, I guess).

I'm all for encasing the ed Phd's and ed schools in cement.  However, it's not fair to make the undergrad ed majors suffer, too.  It's not their fault they're getting a crappy education. 

When I left academe for K-12, I thought the same thing you do - that ed majors are dumb and teachers are morons.  This turns out not to be true.  The teachers are pretty bright (it's the administrators that are the morons).  Until you've actually taught in the public school system, don't be so quick to believe the stereotypes. 

Anyway, you left out more than special ed.  What are we going to do with students who don't speak English, with emotionally-disturbed students, with poor students who don't have enough to eat or who live on the street, with students who don't come to school....teachers in public schools are dealing with much more than a content area.  Also, you left out the elementary school years altogether - there is no content area there.  These are the defining years for most kids as a student.  Who will teach reading and writing (and no, an English PhD is not going to have any idea how to teach a five year old to read - take it from me, been there tried that, no worky worky, five year old brains bear little resemblance to college student brains).

[larryc]

StudentAffairs, I challenge you to make your next ten posts without using a single meaningless buzz word or educational soundbite.

[big_giant_head]

For what it's worth, here's a link:

http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended%20Graduate%20Major.htm

I know all the reasons not to take standardized tests as gospel, but here is one possible set of data points.  Look to see where education majors (of all stripes) fall in relation to people with other majors. 

Why is it that lower-scorers are drawn to that field?  That's what I wonder.

Note--other majors can be uneven in their skills; for instance, engineers do well on quantitative measures but terribly in verbal reasoning and analytical writing.  English majors...well, don't ask us any questions that have numbers in them, but look where we rank on the other two scales.  But education majors in general are toward the bottom on all three scales.  Why?

And doesn't it seem reasonable to address this situation as a part of reforming K-12 education?

[studentaffairsed]

And doesn't it seem reasonable to address this situation as a part of reforming K-12 education?

Not sure.

It is all interrelated.  Policians try to "improve" K-12 while the college education programs are not changing their curriculums.  We need to do a complete organization change.

It is a lot to get your head around in terms of how to fix the disconnects.

[maries]

For what it's worth, here's a link:

http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended%20Graduate%20Major.htm


Why is it that lower-scorers are drawn to that field?  That's what I wonder.

Note--other majors can be uneven in their skills; for instance, engineers do well on quantitative measures but terribly in verbal reasoning and analytical writing.  English majors...well, don't ask us any questions that have numbers in them, but look where we rank on the other two scales.  But education majors in general are toward the bottom on all three scales.  Why?

I'm not sure we can put too much stock in those statistics.  There is too much information missing there. 

It is entirely possible that to some degree top students are not drawn to education, because it is perceived as a low-paying, low-respect job.  But there could also be other factors.  For example, when I took GRE's, I studied for them and prepared for them, because I wanted to get into a competitive school (I am in the humanities), and knew that it would be difficult.  On the other hand, most teachers I know have graduate degrees from whatever college is most convenient for night courses, because they get them while working full-time (tuition reimbursement and a salary increase are the big motivators).  In my area of the country (a big one), there really isn't usually any issue of competitiveness as far as getting into grad school for education, and taking the GRE is just a formality for the teachers I know.  Anyway, that's just one example of something the chart doesn't really tell us.  I honestly haven't found that teachers are not smart, only that they don't have training and experience in critical thinking (the education field doesn't seem to encourage it).

[maries]

And just to clarify - when I said teachers don't have training, I meant training in critical thinking, in analyzing and evaluating information independently, as we are trained to do in Phd programs.  I did NOT mean they need more training in someone else's dumb idea for vocabulary games (i.e. "professional development").

[studentaffairsed]

And just to clarify - when I said teachers don't have training, I meant training in critical thinking, in analyzing and evaluating information independently, as we are trained to do in Phd programs.  I did NOT mean they need more training in someone else's dumb idea for vocabulary games (i.e. "professional development").

I know I should not ask... but were those "vocab games" actually passed off as professional development?

The earlier of critical thinking, analyzing and evaluating information is the kind of professional development I am talking about.

[maries]

studentaffairs, I am sorry to report that vocab games, reading an article and discussing with our "elbow partners," and many other degrading acts are considered professional development in the K-12 world.  In fact, I have encountered little else.  I have never once, in all my years in lower education, had any workshop presenter provide one piece of research, one primary source, or even any kind of logical argument to support their position.

[studentaffairsed]

studentaffairs, I am sorry to report that vocab games, reading an article and discussing with our "elbow partners," and many other degrading acts are considered professional development in the K-12 world.  In fact, I have encountered little else.  I have never once, in all my years in lower education, had any workshop presenter provide one piece of research, one primary source, or even any kind of logical argument to support their position.

That is unfortunate.  And hence I can fully understand your frustration with the thread I started regarding professional development.

[tolerantly]

Student_affairs, I write K-12 test-prep texts and other review materials for a living.  What I have to keep in mind, as I write, is not the reading level of the students, but the intellectual abilities of the teachers and their education.  Because that's the bottleneck.  There's actually a lot of leeway in those standards.  You can do all kinds of interesting things and not run afoul of the standards.  But you can't do anything the teachers can't grasp easily.  Demonstrating how ideas run across subject areas, for instance, is daring stuff.  I've just done a crazy, crazy thing by emphasizing the chemistry across an entire year's science review, and the idea that there's a lot of scientific territory where you're looking at metals ferrying electrons.  I also have to be very careful to get stuff right, not because the teachers will come back and say "hey, this is wrong, don't buy texts from this company next time," but because the odds are excellent that the teachers will just recite the errors to the students.  They don't know.  Now it's tough, and maybe impossible, for me to get things right, because outside a couple of subjects, my level of understanding is undergraduate at best.  And yet I'm hired to write these things because that's the degree of inaccuracy that's acceptable to K-12 teachers in this country.  I'm also regarded as unusually thorough and conscientious on the publishing side.

The feedback I get from editors and publishers is that so long as the tone isn't condescending, the teachers love being told exactly what to do and say.  That way they know they're doing what they're supposed to do, it minimizes their risk when it comes to dealing with admin and board, and there's some sense that it'll be coherent and effective.  You go try that in a university.  The faculty would never put up with it.  It's a huge deal if you try to force particular texts on profs for survey/intro courses.  Part of the reason the profs are there is that they have the intellectual chops to think for themselves and figure out how to structure classes.

I remember a 9th-grade teacher who also liked being told what to do and say.  He'd won all kinds of teaching awards.  Mr. Ask, ironically enough.  Mr. Ask taught Dickens, and the time I was just getting irritable about the idea of reading novels as if they were messages in sociological bottles.  Mr. Ask had lots of notes for us about the name symbolism in one of the novels, and I asked him how he knew that stuff was true.  Well, he said, it was the generally accepted interpretation.  Fortunately, I had no idea what that meant, so I kept asking him how he, Mr. Ask, knew this was true.  He didn't have an answer, because of course he didn't know it was true (it's now obvious to me that it is true, and if asked I could explain why, though not happily, since I think it's a crummy kind of writing), but eventually he threatened to throw me out of the gifted class (odd, since not statutorily possible) and sent me to the principal's office. 
 
This is the problem with teachers' having to rely on textbook writers to play marionette master.  It's also the problem with this complete nonsense about the teachers' only having to be a step ahead of the kids.  It's a very good way to go wrong, especially if you're not inclined to investigate.  Take the thermohaline circulation, for instance.  This is becoming a standard part of the  "scare the kids about global warming" curriculum.  Recently, it took me about six hours to begin to determine that there is no consensus on a) whether global warming is likely to slow or stop the circulation; b) whether it would in fact matter to Europe's climate if the circulation stopped because of global warming.  I do not understand the language or arguments in the relevant papers, though I've tried to read them, and in fact I'm so far at sea that I'm not sure they're really the relevant papers.  But you will see it blithely asserted in the texts, thanks to BBC reports, that global warming can stop this very slow circulation and plunge Europe into an ice age.  I would like to see a show of hands of K-12 science teachers who can explain why this is, at best, a premature conclusion.   (I would go listen.) 

I could go on and on with the stories.  I'm sure that a lot of these people are very nice, and that compared with the general population they're of at least average intelligence.  But on the whole, no, my own experience with K-12, my experience with the ed biz, and the feedback and editorial direction I get says no, these ain't the sharpest knives in the box.  What matters at least as much to me is that they don't know the subjects they're teaching.  Yes, they have teaching degrees and certificates in the subjects.  That's not the same thing.

[tolerantly]

It is entirely possible that to some degree top students are not drawn to education, because it is perceived as a low-paying, low-respect job.  But there could also be other factors. 

Particularly the part about having to teach whatever the box tells you to teach, in whatever asinine way the materials direct you to teach it.  And the lack of time for your own research that keeps you current in your field.  And your colleagues' lack of genuine interest and ability in their fields -- the subject itself, not "teaching".  That's before we get to the social-worker aspect of the job.

I'm a mother.  If you want a poorly-paid, low-respect job, that's it.  That one I'll do.  There's not enough money to persuade me to step into a K-12 classroom.

I honestly haven't found that teachers are not smart, only that they don't have training and experience in critical thinking (the education field doesn't seem to encourage it).

Yes, what you said.

How do I say this?  I think that on the whole, smart people tend to figure out that critical-thinking business pretty well on their own.  Except then it's just called "paying attention", and "have you thought of --" and the occasional, "Oh, s***."

[studentaffairsed]

On the textbook topic for K-12-- there is a thing called the California and Texas effect-- where text's are written for adoption in those states.

So for instance if a book cannot be sold in Texas- it probably will not be printed.

[maries]

Uh huh.  Fascinating.  And the last time you were actually in a classroom trying to teach the material yourself was......ever? 

God, is it any wonder that no one smart wants to be a teacher, when people who have never set foot in a classroom assume they are all stupid based on vague, self-serving rumors?

Could it be possible, just maybe, that textbook publishers say teachers want to be told exactly what to do because they are the ones whose job it is to tell them?

Also, you lose sight of some important differences between K-12 and college.  No, no teacher wants to choose his or her own textbook - because we can't.  We have to buy them ourselves unless they are given to us by the district.  Plus, the schools can't realistically buy a different text for, say, every chemistry teacher.  So logistically, we all must use the same book.  And we usually all have to pass the same test, which we typically have no part in making. 

And you don't want to know what teachers have to say about test makers - your opinion of teachers is kind compared to their opinion of those in your profession.