

Teacher certification a painful farce - cwan
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/sep/15/teacher-certification-a-painful-farce/

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jdminhbg
From my anecdotal experience, maddening red tape like this is much more of a
problem for attracting quality teachers than pay is. There are lots of people
who are smart and driven but don't care much about money; just look at the
ranks of the non-profit world. But you have to be a special kind of crazy to
want to put up with these Kafkaesque rules.

~~~
timwiseman
This again is anecodotal, but my wife is in the process of working on her
master's thesis in history. She went for the master's for personal development
reasons, but now that she is close to getting it she started looking at what
she wanted to do to pay off the student loans and thought of teaching.

Once she finishes she will meet the requirements to apply as a full instructor
at the multiple community colleges within commuting distance, and as and
adjunct professor/instructor at both the local 4 year college and the
university she is about to graduate from. To teach at the public high schools
though, she will need to go back and complete classes in education the
equivalent of another full-time year in college.

~~~
lief79
Practically speaking, at a minimum, she should be required to demonstrate an
ability to student teach for a half year before being hired.

There are definitely some tricks to running a good classroom, but I have no
idea if the education courses are in anyway connected to what is needed for
the real experience. At a minimum, I would hope they would provide some
guidance in how to compensate for different learning styles, how to properly
handle difficult students, etc.

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trafficlight
Ironically, my wife has a problem of too much education. She graduated in 2006
with a bachelor's in both Elementary Education and English as a Second
Language. She tried to get a job for a year somewhere in the state (Montana).
No one would hire her because she didn't have enough practical education.

So she went back and got her Master's in English as a Second Language. Also
while doing so she taught at the school to build up her "contracted" work
experience.

Now she doesn't even get interviews for elementary teaching positions because
she has too much education and too much experience. Most of the school
districts have a policy to hire only those fresh out of school because they
can pay them less.

My wife is a very talented teacher and just wants to be able to teach. She
doesn't care about the money and would be happy to take the lowest pay grade
available. Union rules require that they pay her at her experience/education
level.

I have no hope for the public system.

~~~
lief79
Then she should be applying at the private schools, who still have the option
of paying her less.

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apowell
My wife, a civil engineer from Georgia Tech, was told she did not have enough
college math credits to become a teacher in California. If she wanted to teach
here, she would need to take another college math class, such as basic
algebra.

~~~
skolor
To throw my anecdote in there:

Several years ago my family moved to Florida to be closer to my grandparents.
My mother found out that the only teaching position she was "qualified" to do
was as a substitute teacher. She had previously taught several different
levels of Science in a different state, had a BS in Biology, a Masters in
Chemistry and a Law Degree (Teaching was actually the 5th profession she
tried). In order to teach science in Florida, she would be required to take
roughly a year and a half worth of college courses, and get a different
certification.

~~~
lief79
This is probably closely connected to why Florida is in the bottom 25% of
states in terms of school quality.

The red tape scares away some of the best teachers.

Of course, I'm not sure any of those rankings compensate for social-economic
factors that will skew these factors. What I have heard is that the Florida
districts really set back the migrant students who ended up in my Mother in
Laws classroom in NJ for part of every year. That might be due to them ending
up in some of Florida's worst school districts of course.

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wsprague
I think the teaching certification cluster is due to a few cultural dynamics:

1\. There is an overall trend to more bureaucratization, and bureaucracies
often evaluate their officers based on formal certification, especially when
there is no structure to measure output. So I support wide spread standardized
testing ....

2\. The public educational system is designed to enculturate the entire
population, including a big proportion of folks that are needed to provide
working class labor and reproduction of more working class laborers. So if 80%
of the country get a crappy education due to a certification system that
rewards mediocrity and punishes excellence, then the system has succeeded.

3\. Good education hurts. Not be Nietszchean (sp?) or anything, but most
people are taught that fun and ease are the highest ideals in life -- how can
you really teach if you, your administrators, the kids, and the parents all
believe that you should maximize personal pleasure rather than maximize
personal accomplishment?

I apologize for the rant, but the unbelievably bad education in the US is
probably the issue that most infuriates me.

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marze
No surprises here, anything that reduces supply increases price (of a teacher)
is lobbied for by the powerful teachers unions.

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Locke1689
_I have a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown_

What? If you can get a Bachelor of Science in something not even tangentially
related to science then what is the degree for?

~~~
euroclydon
Ever hear of Political Science? My wife majored in it, and she used to always
talks about her statistics course; doesn't know a lick of stats though.

~~~
eru
"The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be
general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that
any field that had the word "science" in its name was guaranteed thereby not
to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science,
Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science.
Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its predictive
power." (Gerald Weinberg, "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking")

[Actually it's from the fortune program.]

~~~
Locke1689
Eh, I at least understand getting a BS in computer science degree if it's in
the engineering school. As an engineer I'm required to take a very math and
science heavy course load and all the various engineering core curricula. In
addition, I can see computer science as being categorized as science for
historical reasons, but if it's not science it is at least applied
mathematics. Given that applied math is an engineering degree, I see no reason
why computer science shouldn't be.

In contrast, not only does political science have nothing to do with science,
but the course requirements aren't even science related. Maybe, if you're
lucky, you'll take one basics statistics course. However, I have yet to see a
polisci course that requires differential equations.

~~~
eru
Yes. I just posted the fortune cookie because it's funny. In German we talk
about natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and mind sciences
(Geisteswissenschaften). I guess it's just in English that sciencies implies
natural sciences.

Interestingly, while using math is in practice the hallmark of a proper
science, in theory the experiment as final arbiter separates the sciences from
the rest. So math, with no experiments to rely on, is not considered a proper
science.

~~~
Locke1689
You're not gonna believe this but I was going to say the same thing. I speak
German and was going to mention Naturwissenschaften/Geisteswissenschaften but
I figured no one else on HN spoke German so it wouldn't be that helpful :)

BTW I wasn't using math as an example of why computer science is a science,
but rather why it can be justified that computer science gets placed in the
school of engineering and one earns a B.S.

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teeja
Like most standardized testing ... like the largely invisible 'accreditation'
establishment ... like most education ... certification has been politicized.
That's because education has been twisted into a vehicle of social-
engineering.

I'll quote Zinn the Wise here: "... honest, and therefore unmanageable."

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mattmcknight
Makes me think about how programmer certification would work in the context of
licensing. Working as a government contractor, we already see a fair amount of
certification requirements. At least those are tests though, just taking
courses doesn't guarantee much of anything.

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thras
Teacher certification is vitally important: it props up teacher wages.

Oh, did anyone think it had another purpose?

Education is a funny field. When you test the IQ of people by university
subject, you generally find that the hard sciences have the highest IQs
(physics and math at the top) followed by the social sciences followed by the
artsy stuff. Education is at the very bottom.

However, in every field but education, you find that people with PhDs are
smarter than the people with Master's who tend to be smarter than people with
just BS or BA degrees.

Education is the only field where this is reversed. The people with PhDs are
the dumbest of the lot.

I heard a funny story once about someone who cheated on his teacher
certification exam. He had failed twice and was about to lose his job. So he
paid a homeless person to take the test for him. They only caught the cheater
because the homeless guy scored better than anyone else in the district and
officials got curious about the improvement.

~~~
cglee
I don't find the IQ correlation that important, to be honest. What makes a
good educator? Is it the ability to process IQ-type problems? Or is it more
tied to some other attribute not measured by IQ, say, emphasizing with
students? (I have no clue, just saying that IQ may or may not be the end all
be all for educators).

~~~
singlow
I think it really depends on the subject being taught. I had an eighth grade
Algebra teacher who could barely do the problems herself. She could empathize
with the student pretty well, especially when neither of them could figure out
how the get the answer in the key.

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MaysonL
* when neither of them could figure out how the get the answer in the key.*

It's possible that the answer in the key was wrong. I spent a few years
volunteering for RFBD.org, reading math & science textbooks a few hours a
week, and many of the texts had answers in the back which frequently were not
for the question in the front.

~~~
singlow
Unfortunately that was not the case. She just had to rely on the smarter
students to help her. Then they hired us (woohoo 4.15/hr) to come tutor the
algebra class after school three times a week while we were in high school.
Almost every algebra student came to the tutoring session most of the time.
The teacher never showed up once.

