Should it be Harder to Become a Teacher? Harder How?
Amanda Ripley has a thoughtful piece at Slate on how states are passing regulations that raise the SAT score/GPA bar for getting accepted into teacher training programs. I thought a lot about this as I wrote The Teacher Wars, which is a history of teaching in America (out Sept. 2! Plug plug!). It became pretty obvious to me that one of the original sins of our public education system was the normal school, a special school for preparing teachers — segregated from other higher education — which originally accepted only women, because women were cheaper to employ en masse as teachers. These normal schools, which began opening in the 1830s, were, at first, a substitute for academic high school. They sometimes accepted students with the equivalent of only a sixth or seventh-grade education. Later, the normal schools evolved into many of today’s non-selective regional state colleges. These colleges continue to prepare the majority of American teachers, who enter the classroom with undergraduate degrees in education.
As early as the 1850s, smart people who cared about public schools began to critique the “normals.” Susan B. Anthony, who began her activist career organizing her fellow female teachers to demand higher pay, believed teachers would never be respected until they were educated alongside other white-collar professionals. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “It was not enough that the teachers of teachers should be trained in technical normal methods; they must also, so far as possible, be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself.”
Like Amanda (a friend and colleague, whose book I loved) I believe teaching is difficult, highly intellectual work. But here’s what I found in my research. First, while a teacher’s intellectual capacity — measured through the size of their vocabulary, for example, and their writing skill – seems to drive increased student achievement, there is a much more tenuous connection between teachers’ own standardized test scores, their grades, the selectivity of their colleges, and student learning. (High school level math seems to be an exception; there, the teacher’s own achievement matters more.) Research on highly-rated teachers who stay longterm in the profession, and who are willing to commit to work in high-poverty schools, Should it be Harder to Become a Teacher? Harder How? | Dana Goldstein: