TexasBred":3oxrx9va said:
angie":3oxrx9va said:
TexasBred":3oxrx9va said:
Nothing against teachers but a huge majority of public school teachers come from the bottom 15-20% of the class. Sad but true.
Show me where you find this information. I have been in the public schools for just over 20 years, and I am impressed again and again by the high level of competence in the staff I work with here in Mn.
There are good teachers..no doubt about it...but my experience with them (including 2 in the family) is that they nothing about much of anything except their field of study and are only average in that. I've know some very brillant, ethical, attorneys as well but they are the minority. ;-)
Tons of people use a McKinsey report as the reference for the statistic of teachers coming from the bottom third of colleges. That report just uses a quote saying that:
"We are now recruiting our teachers from the bottom third of high school students going to college…" (p. 19)
It uses as its citation "Tough Choices Or Tough Times" , a report issued by The New Commission On The Skills Of The American Workforce in 2007.
So I went there. The link in the preceding paragraph only leads to a downloadable summary, which just stated the same statistic with no citation of a source. So, I went to Amazon, downloaded a Kindle Reader for my PC, and purchased the whole report.
That report uses as its source a "Report From The Department Of Education, National Center For Education Statistics, The Condition Of Education 2002." It quotes the report as saying:
"A report by the National Council on Teacher Quality in 2004 said that the profession attracts a 'disproportionately high number of candidates from the lower end of the distribution of academic ability.' And, college graduates whose SAT or ACT scores were in the bottom quartile were more than twice as likely as those in the top quartile to have majored in education."
TB, I would really like to wow you with an articulate, well thought out response backed by research, but I seriously don't have the time, if I wait until the weekend it will no longer matter (to me, at any rate) and it looks like Larry covered 2 of my bases already (thanks Larry!).
In preperation for my Wow factor response, I researched your first quote from the TCoTT report and found it to be incomplete, the actual quote is:
"We are now recruiting more of our teachers from the bottom third of the high school students going to college than is wise."
The last 3 words were, in my opinion, intentionally left out by the authors of the first article you quote. Including them makes the statement a nonsense statement, and does nothing to make their point.
I looked into getting the NTCQ reports, but there are several reports from 2004, and I don't have the time to sort through them (I am thinking you must either be the boss or be retired!). I would also add that teaching certification qualifications have and continue to change, becoming more stringent. While that is a very good thing, it makes statistics from 2004 nothing more than interesting.
Quite honestly, the information I was requesting was where you found the numbers for your first quote "a huge majority of public school teachers come from the bottom 15-20% of the class." ~ the response that prompted my reply in the first place.
Lunch is almost over, but I want to reiterate ~ I have been in the public school system a long time. I regret that you have poor examples in your family and maybe in your experience as a student or parent of students. As I stated earlier, I am impressed again and again by the intelligence of my colleagues, by their comittment to continuing their education, their knowledge in their field (personally I don't care if the teacher teaching my kid to write an essay can figure out what "25% off" means), their ability to discuss current local and world events responsibly and intelligently with students (an ability I find lacking in too many adults these days) and their commitment to student achievement, demonstrated on a
daily basis.
Probably will wish I had said more or less or different, but lunch is officially done so I am too! :tiphat: