1/2 of teachers in US come from bottom 1/3 of their class

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/ideas/2013/04/do-teachers-need-their-own-bar-exam/


... Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City’s Department of Education. Writing on The Atlantic website, he pointed out that pretty much anyone who graduates from college in America today can become a teacher, and that “job security, not teacher excellence, defines the workforce culture.” He also quoted a sobering statistic from McKinsey: The U.S. gets nearly half of its teachers from the bottom third of its college classes...Jal Mehta,an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, wrote that compared to many other fields where quality is maintained by building a body of knowledge and training people in that knowledge, “American education is a failed profession.”
He added:
“We let doctors operate, pilots fly and engineers build because their fields have developed effective ways of certifying that they can do these things. Teaching, on the whole, lacks this specialized knowledge base; teachers teach based mostly on what they have picked up from experience and from their colleagues.”...In the end, this discussion often ends up in Finland. It’s the Magic Kingdom of Education, the place the experts talk about when they imagine what American teachers could be. Roughly 40 years ago, the Finnish government concluded that the key to the country’s economic future was a first-class public education system...To even be accepted into a Finnish teacher education program, candidates must be at the top of their class, complete exams on pedagogy, be observed often in clinical settings, and pass a challenging interview. Only about 1 in 10 Finnish applicants are accepted to study to be teachers. And while the U.S. has more than 1,200 universities that train teachers, Finland has only eight. In short, teachers need to earn the right to feel special.

So, does that elevated status of teachers there result in better students? Yes, you could say that. In science, in math, in reading, Finnish students rank first in the world.

 

1/2 of teachers in US come from bottom 1/3 of their class

Apparently 5/3rds of these teachers are shit at fractions. ..

 

I always knew most of my teachers were fools.

 

As the old adage says, "Those who Can't Do, Teach."

BTW, didn't Obama teach about the Constitution?

 

Is that what it was, I thought he taught Cannabis 101.

 

1) It's easy to do that in a homogenous society without minorities that "dilute" the education.
2) Does Finland have a "problem" with Estonian and Russian immigrants who are below grade-level?

 

"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym".

 

Thanks for correcting me. @%$@%$&

 

You're preaching to the choir.

 

Actually, this figure has been found to be total B.S. The distribution of teachers' ranking in their class is a bell curve that pretty much mirrors all other subjects. 1/2 of teachers in the U.S. DO NOT come from bottom 1/3 of their class from a GPA perspective. One half of the teachers in a large urban city where this study was done and promoted by McKinsey were in the bottom 1/3 of their class - the reason - no decent teacher wants to teach in a tough urban Title 1 school.

People can argue if the education required to become a teacher is as difficult as a degree in engineering or medicine. In my opinion it is not. This is why engineers are paid more than teachers - ignoring the fact that teachers only work 10 months per year.