“Education” majors accuse UCLA professor of racism for correcting their spelling and grammar
Here’s another reason why the “education” major should be abolished. Over at UCLA, approximately 25 “education” majors staged a sit-in, after accusing their professor of racism because he corrected their spelling and grammar.
K-12 education would be far better in this country if the “education” major was abolished, and classes were taught by people who had degrees in the subject that they were teaching. Students who major in English literature understand the importance of proper spelling and grammar, and would never think that it was “racist” to correct mistakes in those areas.
As I’ve pointed out before, education majors have the lowest SAT scores of any college major. CBS News reported:
education majors… enter college with the lowest average SAT
Also, as I’ve pointed out before, public schools teach math and science much better when the teachers don’t have a degree in “education.” The Wall St. Journal reported:
This month 3,700 recent college grads will begin Teach for America’s five-week boot camp, before heading off for two-year stints at the nation’s worst public schools.
Teach for America offers smart young people something even better than money – the chance to avoid the vast education bureaucracy. Participants need only pass academic muster and attend the summer training before entering a classroom. If they took the traditional route into teaching, they would have to endure years of “education” courses to be certified.
The American Federation of Teachers commonly derides Teach for America as a “band-aid.” One of its arguments is that the program only lasts two years, barely enough time, they say, to get a handle on managing a classroom. However, it turns out that two-thirds of its grads stay in the education field, sometimes as teachers, but also as principals or policy makers.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter that they are only in the classroom a short time, at least according to a recent Urban Institute study. Here’s the gist: “On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors. The TFA teachers’ effect on student achievement in core classroom subjects was nearly three times the effect of teachers with three or more years of experience.
It’s a tragedy that the dumbest college students are the ones who end up becoming teachers.
The “education” major should be abolished.
