Why Smart, Ambitious People Rarely Become Teachers � The Quick and the Ed

Why Smart, Ambitious People Rarely Become Teachers � The Quick and the Ed

Why Smart, Ambitious People Rarely Become Teachers

by Forrest Hinton

WARNING: This blog post is utterly simple and obvious. There are some life phenomena, events, and trends that are widely recognized and accepted by most people as just plain Truth. (Majority perception isn’t always right, but it often is.) The argument that follows needs no regressions, 5-page data sets, or integration symbols.
This is a fact: Smart, ambitious people are rarely choosing K-12 teaching as a career these days.
Consider that, in 2007, among high school seniors who took the SAT and intended to major in education, theaverage scores were a dismal 480 in Critical Reading, 483 in Mathematics, and 476 in Writing. Compare those scores with the average scores of students intending to become engineers—524, 579, and 510. Or to students intending to enter the fields of communications and journalism: 523, 501, 519. Also consider that the most competitive, elite colleges and universities, like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, aren’t offeringundergraduate majors in teaching or education.
So why don’t the nation’s best, brightest, most motivated, most talented students choose to pursue K-12