>>I’d like to see the math proficiency scores of the teachers.
And there you’ve identified the problem with one short sentence.
When I was young and bored I took my first master’s degree in education with a program for one year and $1,000. Ended up taking longer since I asked them to let me write a thesis instead of taking the exam. Sigh. But I went from University of Chicago to a teacher’s college and came out of the program with very mixed emotions. First, I finally saw what happens when you get teachers who specialize in teaching rather than research. At U of C, I had a Nobel prize winning professor for whom my husband’s ADVISOR! had signed a petition way back when to suggest he spend his time ONLY doing research. Some of these teaching profs could have taught that man a thing or two.
But some of the others! I’d never seen teachers so dictatorial before EVER! They taught one technique and one only. It took a while (I was young) before I realized that they didn’t know enough to allow their students to deviate in the least. They’d obtained the limit of their competence and couldn’t discuss issues or, to my young mind, even think clearly.
At Chicago, I’d never questioned the knowledge of a teacher. The issue was whether they had the skill to pass it on. Here I found that it was a rare teacher whose knowledge could be respected.
And the students. They were lovely. Not the best and the brightest, but the sweetest and most into cooperation that I’d ever met. No one fought for grades. If you didn’t show up, everyone was there to worry about you and to support showing you what you missed. Again, jaw-dropping after Chicago.
So I did come out of teacher’s college with a respect for teachers, but doubts about what they’d learned.
Then I became best friends with a teacher from one of the great inner city NYC schools. The kind protected by her students when she was in their neighborhood. The kind who taught them Shakespeare and made them want to understand. From a school that made the students pass exams to get in.
Over the years I watched her grading papers at home and watched as her standards, set by her superiors, degraded and let more and more errors pass by. As her grading was controlled and more poor students were made to feel good about themselves, but not to realistically understand what they knew and what they didn’t know.
And this woman was the best of the best!
Today, her standards are just a memory. If the students who graduated without knowing what standards were were slotted into teaching colleges as both teachers and as students, then they would end up trained by the rigid techniques of teachers who didn’t understand themselves, and passed with the same limited requirements that they would then pass on to their students.
So where do we go from here? Where do we get that first class of teaching school teachers who know what to teach and how to teach?
Well, if conservatives were in charge and were willing to challenge the teacher’s unions, we might get them from universities with a mixture of heavy testing requirements and heavy - and temporary - government grants, along with a program of inspiring idealist goals like the Peace Corps of our youth. Yes, that was a birthplace of much liberalism, but couldn’t those same techniques produce a birthplace of much conservatism?
So you end up with battle royals in red states at a time when conservatives have the White House. You lose maybe 3 years of students while the battles go on. A loss we now understand thru the covid period. But we get a group of teachers of teachers that won’t pass thru every teacher, but will pass thru a core to spread. To spread, that is, until the White House once again goes liberal and stops the experiment.
But at least we’d have a core of good teachers for when conservatives can restart the fight and the experiment.