My reading habits are distressingly random these days. I’m not happy with feedly. Too many friends and favorite reads don’t have proper RSS feeds. I use twitter a lot for reading suggestions, but nine times out ten, the links lead to some stupid Buzzfeed article. My usual online magazines have been publishing crap lately. Ugh, what’s a compulsive online reader to do?
As a blogger, I like to skim through titles and look for common topics. What’s everybody bitching about today? What can I add to the dialogue? That’s a lot harder to do these day. I need to clean up my blogroll or something. Maybe later.
One common topic over the past couple of weeks has been some griping about Ivy League graduates. Frank Bruni and David Brooks were talking about that this week.
I came across a similar discussion in the education blogs this week.
Wendy Kopp of Teach for America and Diane Ravitch have been slowly and subtly fighting for months. Teach for America’s basic premise is that an untrained teacher with an Ivy League school is better than a trained teacher with a BA in education from a mediocre college. In other words, brains wins over education training.
Ravitch has been slowly simmering over this message. She is putting her eggs in the training basket and is making snide comments about Teach for America here and there.
I would love to see a drag out fight on this topic, but so far the comments have happened in a passive-aggressive, non-confrontational manner. I want a big debate about the merits of undergraduate education degrees. I also want a big debate about the merits of elite, private schools. Do they really produce better workers?
Apt. 11d 
In Russia, you’d have pedagogical colleges (not sure exactly what range of teachers they prepared–presumably at least elementary teachers), but I got the feeling that academic departments would also train students to teach in their fields. So, I had a Russian friend who studied physics in college. Her degree simultaneously qualified her to be a physics lab tech and a school physics teacher.
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Most of the new TFA teachers don’t come from the Ivy League: https://www.teachforamerica.org/sites/default/files/2013_top_college_contributors.pdf.
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Nobody got fired for buying IBM. So goes the old saying. Were their products better? I do not know–I was not in the workforce during that company’s golden era.
But as between a name-dropping school and an ordinary one, employers will favor the name-dropping one. Maybe they can figure out a way to weed out the candidate who appears lazy, or has some other red flag. But, other things being equal, the better the perceived quality of the school, the better chance the candidate has at being hired. And that is why parents are in this crazy race for pedigree, a race that, to me, borders on child abuse. The workers are not necessarily better. But they have jobs. Everyone from a blue-chip school can still say that, I think. It’s less true the further down the reputation ladder you go.
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Yes, with all things being equal, I agree.
I think there’s a significant desire out there for people not to believe this, and, I also think that the schools that get included in the “name dropping” change, at least if they aren’t Harvard (which is always a name that can be dropped). Now, one way in which all things can be unequal is if a student is a stellar student from a non-name school, if they have a degree that is in significant need, and recommendations that say they are excellent and capable, have already done the work (in internships, or in a lab, evidenced by work product that can be observed, like software already written, or papers already published).
The schools that “count” are increasing, too, even if the number of spots at Harvard aren’t increasing. I myself now know of schools (other people in other fields knew of these already, and my own school probably fits in this category for others) that I didn’t know of before (like Williams, which I understand is a school whose name can be dropped).
For some degrees, one can drop the name of ones graduate education rather than undergraduate (i.e. law school, as an example). And, a medical degree is still a professional qualification that gets you a job (though not any job) without a name to drop.
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My issue is not on the difference academic training between traditional teacher training and the “ivy league.” I don’t know whether teacher training v ivy league education in the field you teach would make you a better teacher (at the HS level — I think ivy league training doesn’t offer a lot of instruction on how to deal with children in developmentally labile periods. Some ivy-league types might have that ability, but I’m inclined to believe the qualities selected for in elite education are not the kind that make you patient and kind and helpful to literally snotty faced children). The subject of what kind of training (and selected qualities) are more important is still open in my mind.
My issue is the on-the-job training. There’s no quesiton in my mind that some amount of working as a teacher, say, at least five years or so, improves teachers. First year teachers, even ones who are going to be great, are usually not so great, and especially not so great at dealing with difficulties (like developmental issues, behavior issues, cognitive problems, learning disabilities, . . . .). Maybe a first year teacher with a very small class of easy to teach children would make up for any lack of experience with enthusiasm and understanding, but not a teacher dealing with a standard classroom.
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bj said:
“My issue is the on-the-job training. There’s no quesiton in my mind that some amount of working as a teacher, say, at least five years or so, improves teachers. First year teachers, even ones who are going to be great, are usually not so great,”
Yeah. It’s the first year of teaching that is terrible, and the second year is pretty rough. Just about everybody who has taught K-12 will tell you that.
When I was a Peace Corps volunteer, we did an intensive EFL teacher training where we did about a month of practice teaching in a sort of summer camp thing (that’s probably a close equivalent to the Teach for America set-up). It was a good start and got us all thinking about lesson planning and content and so forth, but it was not the same as working at an actual school or working out of an actual textbook. Also, we were the first batch of ESL teachers in our program, and there some very obvious glitches in the initial training. It is a very unfortunate fact that the people who were training us knew essentially nothing about the Russian school system.
The first year of teaching was just a blur, followed by a summer of thinking, what can I do better? The second year was better, but there was definitely still a lot of room for improvement. If I were doing it today, I would definitely do a lot of stuff very differently, but being a middle aged lady with a family, I’m not going to be signing up for another stretch with the Peace Corps any time soon.
The big thing that nobody really prepares you for, in education classes or in one of these intensive teacher training things, is classroom management. That’s the one area where new teachers just about always fall down. I feel like it would have been possible to do more theory in our training, but there’s no substitute for the actual live fire experience (literal, in some cases).
If I were doing a training, I’d show “Entre les murs,” stopping it every few minutes to ask, “What is he doing wrong here?”
http://xantippesblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/entre-les-murs.html
http://xantippesblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/entre-les-murs-ii.html
http://xantippesblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/entre-les-murs-iii.html
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This, exactly, down to the Peace Corps teaching experience (math and science in Samoa). My first year, I was just lost; my second year I could see what was going wrong, I just couldn’t actually do things right yet, and I never taught a third year but it would probably have been much better. I don’t have a strong opinion about education degrees, particularly, but the valorization of energetic young inexperienced teachers who aren’t going to stick around long enough to get experienced in programs like Teach for America drives me nuts.
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elizardbreath said:
“I don’t have a strong opinion about education degrees, particularly, but the valorization of energetic young inexperienced teachers who aren’t going to stick around long enough to get experienced in programs like Teach for America drives me nuts.”
Especially when they then go on to big careers in education policy…
A Peace Corps volunteer or a TFA rookie might be better than a new teacher with an education degree, but there’s no comparison between a freshly trained volunteer or TFAer and an actual experienced teacher.
I think pretty much the worst thing about our Peace Corps teacher training was the overconfidence that it instilled. There was some sort of glitch where the main teacher trainer didn’t wind up coming, and the guy who did the training had only been expecting to be an assistant trainer. As a fellow volunteer complained later (and he was actually a really lovable guy), there was a lot of “You’ll be great, they’ll love you!” My personal gripe was that the trainer was running down the teaching methods used in country (which while old-fashioned, were surprisingly effective) and leaving the new volunteers believing that they were the bearers of a shiny, new EFL pedagogy and they had nothing to learn from their Russian colleagues. Au contraire. It was a really disastrous approach and I hope TFA does not do that and that that was an aberration within Peace Corps.
Peace Corps got kicked out of Russia about a decade ago.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/The-end-has-begun-for-Peace-Corps-program-in-2679415.php
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In the IT industry formal schooling is often viewed with suspicion (or shall we say viewed as inferior to real-world experience). As a result Ivies are not common – they typically gravitate towards a field that will reward them for their credential, as so many other fields will do.
I can say that at my previous consulting firm we had so much trouble with Ivy grads not performing well that we stopped recruiting them. Popular wisdom was their work ethic was sub-standard and they couldn’t handle setbacks. Setbacks (some would use the word “failures”) are inevitable in life and we always watched new grads very closely to see how they reacted to their first big setback. You learn a ton about a person during this process – sometimes it ended with counsel-out. Interestingly, the candidates often perceived the counsel-out as a result of the setback itself, not realizing that it was their whiny/finger-point-y response that did them in.
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Yep. Any criticism is taken very, very hard. Saying “there is too much on each slide” should not result in some sort of existential crisis that requires hand holding to help the employee get over it. I have to stop myself from saying “Just get out of my office and fix the slides – this is not commentary on your worth as a person.” Then again, maybe I should say that.
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You should try it. I have absolutely no tolerance for that kind of behavior from anyone I work with. I’m working on not making my kids’ friends cry, though.
I have not found this behavior to be correlated with ivy-league status, though. The main differentiator in my experience, on whether people can take criticism, seems to be whether they’ve put themselves in positions to be criticized, and criticized without “compliment sandwiches” or whatever they’re called. Music and sports are two examples, though there are probably others. Scientists can be pretty harsh with criticism (especially when occasionally combined with poor social skills).
I’ve noticed this difference among people in art classes I’ve taken as a student. I have no issue with criticism of my artwork, but have noted how many adults are defensive when faced with suggestions for improvement (one common response — “I did that already”, when told that lightening the paint, changing the contour, . . . might improve the portrait).
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To reply to BJ “I’m working on not making my kids’ friends cry, though. “. I screwed up that recently. The daughter of an acquaintance proudly announced she had gotten in to grad school for anthropology. Me -“As long as you aren’t borrowing money, have fun.” Her “Oh, no, I have to pay”. Me – without thinking “Well, you didn’t really get in then, did you.”
OOPS
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Tulip said:
“To reply to BJ “I’m working on not making my kids’ friends cry, though. “. I screwed up that recently. The daughter of an acquaintance proudly announced she had gotten in to grad school for anthropology. Me -”As long as you aren’t borrowing money, have fun.” Her “Oh, no, I have to pay”. Me – without thinking “Well, you didn’t really get in then, did you.”
OOPS”
That was probably the nicest thing anybody did for her that day.
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Unless somebody else tried to give her advice without passive-aggressive wounding.
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MH – yep not the appropriate place or way to say it. I did apologize immediately.
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The problem with new teachers with Ivy League educations is that they are unwilling to deal with a lot of the nasty bits that come with being a low level, no-respect employee. There’s a sense that they are above some of that and shouldn’t have to deal with it. Which, maybe they are, but if they want to be teachers they’ll have to suck it up and do the things they enjoy and the things they think they’re too good for.
There is a similar and more pronounced phenomenon among early childhood teachers. Research about EC teachers has shown that education and training can have a huge impact on their teaching ability but the quality of the teaching education they are receiving varies widely. Anecdotally, I would say the ones who are best prepared are those coming out of flagship states schools that have the infrastructure to provide a robust experience both in academics and in practice, prior to graduation. Graduates of well-respected state schools are also more dedicated to teaching as a profession and have a better grasp of the fact that they are not this year’s Jaime Escalante and that their students won’t just absorb their genius osmotically.
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As a TFA grad (or dropout, actually, I lasted 6 months), I can say that being unwilling to deal with the low-level employee bits was NOT a problem I witnessed. My cohort was full of Princeton, Northwestern, small East Coast elite colleges (Dartmouth, Sarah Lawrence, etc) and to a T, everyone had an exceptional attitude about the work they were doing.
HOWEVER. It is not enough. Not even close. I was assigned to teach 6th grade special ed in rural North Carolina. At one point, I was teaching math, English, science and social studies. Math and English I was good at, the other 2 I was rubbish. I had no idea what I was doing, and no business being responsible for the education of a large group of kids, let alone a large group of kids with major behavioral and learning disorders. I left after Christmas of the first year, despondent, depressed and demoralized. And incredibly guilty about being yet another adult to abandon these kids. Nearly 1/3 of my cohort left at or before the 1st year.
Smarts are not the issue. Dedication, training, and manageable expectations are. And building a workforce with capacity, rather than a workforce who is in it for 2 years, and then off to do consulting work or get an MBA (in most, not all, cases).
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Yeah, I have numerous friends who left TFA, some before even starting teaching, because they got NO support from the program. It just seems like such a terrible idea. It’s very hard on the teachers, and even crueler to students who really would benefit from well-trained, qualified, and stable teachers.
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Do you think you would have done better as a teacher’s aide for two years, with the option of getting your own classroom the third year?
A bunch of my Peace Corps EFL colleagues wound up working under Russian teachers. A number of them chafed at it and would have preferred their own classrooms, but in retrospect, I think it would have been a better model, at least for a first year. (Also, there would be more chance to work for the American partner to learn more about teaching and the Russian partner to improve her English–which would be doubling the volunteer’s impact.)
It’s true there were a number of actual teacher among us who probably could have managed just fine flying solo immediately.
With Peace Corps, also, there are big issues with being way, way away from HQ. It may be better now, with better communications, but back in the 90s, communications were very sparse. Pretty much none of us had a home telephone, and intra-volunteer communications tended to be by telegraph.
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Yes, TSA takes some very conservative ideas and shrouds them with an aura of progressivism. It’s unfair to the students and the TFA teachers. As a kid I went to fairly exceptional low income schools. My 1st grade teacher had a PhD in education in multiracial settings and had been teaching for 30 years. I had a middle school math/science teacher who was white but had grown up poor on the South Side of Chicago. He could relate to poor minority kids, because in many ways their experiences were his experiences growing up. He had also been teaching for 30 years. Both of these teachers were completely skilled at classroom management and teaching simultaneously across a wide variety of levels. These teachers could manage gifted kids, non-English speakers, and kids with severe disabilities, all without losing control of the classroom or making kids feel bored/lost. We handled radioactive materials, live dissections, and lots of field trips. Class sizes were not small–I think our math/science class had 40 kids. But anyways, these are the sorts of people who can produce “Stand and Deliver” results, not some 22 year old econ major from Harvard.
There’s an arrogance to the presumptions which make TFA seem like a good idea. These include: 1) not enough brain power has gone to thinking about inner city issues, so in a couple of years a few smart, hardworking white people can fix issues that (corrupt/lazy/stupid/socialist/etc.) black people have been dealing with for decades, and 2) people who are smart or successful in certain ways are thus better at everything than everyone else. If you’re a neurosurgeon, you’re probably also great at playing piano and football and literary criticism. Related to (2), 3) teaching is easy and requires no particular skills or natural aptitude. People who do become teachers the normal way are lazy/stupid/socialist/couldn’t cut it at anything else. Just be firm-but-kind and well-meaning, tell your minority students you ‘care’ about them and they’ll thank you with tears in their eyes for being the Only Person Who Cared.
I don’t think TFA teachers necessarily think this, but it’s the logic underlying the organization.
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Um, I should have said live animals and dissections. Live dissections sounds awful and like a form of animal abuse.
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“People who do become teachers the normal way are lazy/stupid/socialist/couldn’t cut it at anything else. Just be firm-but-kind and well-meaning, tell your minority students you ‘care’ about them and they’ll thank you with tears in their eyes for being the Only Person Who Cared.”
What they need is a Nice White Lady.
Remember, it’s liberals who keep making all those Nice White Lady movies. You can’t really blame that particular meme on conservatives.
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It’s true that the state flagships send more students to TFA than the Ivies, but the proportion of Ivy students going is considerably higher. Harvard, with 6700 undergraduates, sends 45 to TFA; Texas at Austin, with almost 40,000, sends 75. Just saying–I’m not a TFA fan. As to the Ivies–I’ve been teaching at them since 1974. No generalization I’ve read would come close to covering the immense range of personalities and intellects (and work ethics) that I have encountered at Cornell, Princeton and Columbia. I’ve always found the kids who do teacher prep while undergraduates at Princeton (and a number do) to be very down-to-earth about themselves and the profession–but that’s only my experience.
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“No generalization I’ve read would come close to covering the immense range of personalities and intellects (and work ethics) that I have encountered at Cornell, Princeton and Columbia.”
Wise words, and, they apply to the people who graduated from the rah rah state flagship, too.
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I taught math at a large state school for several years and cringed at the anti-intellectual zeroes who made up the bulk of the education program. So, I see no problem with telling the person who scraped by with a 2.75 GPA teaching degree while partying their way through Bowling Green “Sorry, I see a career at Starbucks in your future.” In fact, I really have no difficulty with the idea that the lower third to half of the students I saw there should be consigned to service industry underemployment. I only worry that we’re dinging the wrong third.
So, I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, I think that teachers should be thoroughly professionalized, although I think that professionalization (especially at the middle and high school levels) should take the form of a good subject matter degree and a one to two year postgrad teaching certificate. On the other hand, I see no problem preferring an enthusiastic and intellectual top school grad who doesn’t happen to have an ed degree over the person who chose to major in education as an easy out and a way to go to parties from Thursday to Sunday for four years.
I’d change my tune about the value of an education degree if we treated the teaching profession like they do in Finland or Germany.
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In fact, I really have no difficulty with the idea that the lower third to half of the students I saw there should be consigned to service industry underemployment.
As some sort of punishment for not behaving the way you want them to?
Teaching skill is important at every level. Probably most important for the youngest of children and decreasing in importance in comparison to subject matter knowledge in the higher grades. But even in post-secondary and beyond the ability to teach well is pretty damn important and a skill that is separate from knowing the subject matter.
I had several professors during grad school that were very smart indeed and also dreadful teachers and I learned almost nothing in their classes as a result of it.
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What I’ve noted is that teaching skill is especially relevant when dealing with minds different from your own. The running joke I had with one of my students was that she could read my mind, because emails would cross asking her to do an analysis 30 seconds before she sent it to me. We were extraordinarily similar thinkers. My own children are actually pretty similar thinkers to me, as well (though not identical). In grad school, I think a lot of the teaching goes on by pairing people correctly (or forcing people out when they can’t find the right pair). So, folks don’t actually learn to teach people who think differently from them. They find the people they think like.
I think that sorting also occurs in a fair number of workplaces, hence the belief that what matters is what you know, not how you teach it (a basis of a lot of the cartoons lampooning the disconnect between the tech and market people — the ones I know make fun of the market people, but, honestly, it does go both ways).
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“I had several professors during grad school that were very smart indeed and also dreadful teachers and I learned almost nothing in their classes as a result of it.”
You do need a certain base level of intelligence, though, for a good teacher, even though the most brilliant are often terrible teachers.
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I just spent the day with several people who teach at a college level in culinary arts (one of whom used to work as a pastry chef in the White House). One of the people was a chair of a culinary arts department who said that being a master chef was no guarantee of being able to teach well. It’s very important to him to hire not just experts in their culinary specialties (and his faculty are experts) but also people who get what teaching is about and are willing to go further to become better teachers. Several of his faculty have pursued or are pursuing masters degrees in teaching to go along with their culinary arts certifications (and apparently, there are many–one of the people I met was going for the Master Sommelier certification, of which there are only 200 or so in the world).
tl;dr: Being great in your specialty doesn’t make you a good teacher, according to people who are great in their specialty and also teach or hire people who teach.
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Does being not very good in a specialty lead to good teaching?
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Here’s an addendum to the problem of brilliant people with great area knowledge who aren’t good teachers.
While it is true that at the lower levels of a subject, you do better with moderate area knowledge/good teaching skills, as the student progresses, they can get more and more from the brilliant/bad teaching skill teachers.
As a somewhat related personal example, even I was a freshly minted Peace Corps volunteer, while I honestly did not have a lot to offer my weaker students, my stronger students were immediately able to soak up all that native speaker goodness.
Likewise, in my own career as a Russian language learner, in the early days, I honestly did need a good trained teacher, but as I progressed I needed good teaching less and less and could get a lot out of just native speakers.
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As some sort of punishment for not behaving the way you want them to?
No.
But there is a certain amount of hand-wringing about the underemployment of college graduates in our economy and the return on investment of a college degree. Which *is* a real problem for many of the underemployed (and for the rest of us, who suffer for it), but I would suggest that when we look at this issue and potential solutions we should look at it in a more granular fashion. Some of the underemployed are so because they looked at college as a four year recreational experience and chose their degree accordingly. I would argue that, for them, “underemployment” is not underemployment at all.
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This year in public school my daughter had an English teacher who told the students that she didn’t like to read and didn’t read for pleasure. Huh? I was so mad! I wanted to march in there and say something to her, but you know that what she would have said is some variant of “It’s a good job with benefits that I was able to secure with only a BA from our local state school. Why shouldn’t I take this job if I can get it?”
I just wish that she would have at least PRETENDED that she was there for something other than the paycheck, at least for the kid’s sake. I’m really torn about the line that you should view your work as a calling — because I feel that it’s something that employers say now when they’re not willing to pay people what they deserve — and the professionalization of careers like teaching.
I think that a TFA program person from an Ivy League school would presumably become an English teacher because they like to read and would be better at conveying that enthusiasm in the classroom over some older bitter person who was clearly just phoning it in for the paycheck. The English teacher who didn’t like to read might have been better at classroom management, since she had a teaching major and not an English major, but would you really want her teaching your child?
Also, the Ivy league person would presumably not have that horrible, sneering attitude towards the smart kids that so many dumb teachers from your local state school have. Have you read any of the literature on bullying? When kids are marginalized in middle school, it’s often because on some level the students are getting signals from the teachers that it’s OK to pick on someone who is different. I could see a smart teacher from the Ivy League being the thing that saves a really smart kid in the inner city who never before got any signals that it was OK to be in love with the subject material — because the professional teacher didn’t like to read.
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Louisa said:
“This year in public school my daughter had an English teacher who told the students that she didn’t like to read and didn’t read for pleasure.”
Oh my goodness.
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I thought many states have moved towards requiring teachers to major in a subject other than education? Looking at our local elementary and middle schools, only the teachers teaching the very youngest students seem to have Early Education degrees–and some of those teachers have BS degrees from colleges which don’t offer education degrees. All the public school teachers have masters degrees, which one would predict due to the steps and lanes model of teacher pay.
The teachers at my children’s private schools all have degrees in their field (i.e., undergraduate subject, not education.) Most, but not all of the degrees are from private colleges. Some degrees are from state flagships. If a teacher decides to study for a master’s or ed. D., it’s a sign he or she wants to be a Dean or Head of school one day. Some teachers, particularly in the Classics, do have master’s or PhDs in their field.
It’s funny Ravitch seems to prefer the training model. I have heard that it can be hard to be hired by a public school if you have a master’s degree, because schools prefer to hire new teachers at lower salaries. Further degrees increase salary requirements. So, as an unintended consequence, such hiring practices mean a student with a master’s, who decides to enter teaching rather than continue toward a doctorate, will find a warmer reception at private schools than at public schools. (Let alone PhDs!)
So you’re more likely at a public school to have teachers who knew they wanted to become teachers when they were juniors in high school. You’re more likely at a private school to have teachers who attended graduate schools other than education schools before deciding to teach. You’re more likely to have teachers who worked in other professions before they started teaching. Some of the best teachers stumble into the profession, because they fell in love with teachers.
I prefer the private school model.
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The problem with the private school model is that we don’t have near enough subject matter experts who want to make a career of middling teaching jobs. There are millions of teachers in this country and we need a robust public system for training teachers (in both teaching pedagogy itself and subject matter) to support a robust public education system for children.
I mean, hey, if all these kids going to Ivy League schools decide what they really, really want to do is become public school teachers, great, but that is unlikely to happen outside of limited situations (i.e. young adults that want to show that they care about the world before moving on to bigger and better things like law school). A successful, professionalized, teaching degree and training system would not need to pull people from the top 1%, or even 5% or 10% of college grads, it would aim for the top 70 to 90%. Grads at that level are still smart and competent and might be willing to entertain the idea of a career, or at least 5 to 10 years, in the field of education.
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I know one, who went to an elite, and graduated to go into teaching in the early days of TFA. She went on to teach in South Central LA, on to teaching in depressed areas in the midwest, and is now a 20+ year veteran teacher. After her stint in LA, her *parents* received a post-card, addressed to the “parents of Ms. X” thanking her parents for having had the daughter who “helped turn their child’s education around)” There are extraordinary stories, and TFA really did provide path for graduates who were considering teaching but weren’t ready to go through the education school route.
But, over the years it’s morphed into a temporary workforce. with the goal of not supplementing and expanding the teaching pool, but of replacing it with employees who will be forever inexpensive, because they will only work during their training years. Combine this with the fact that it’s become a resume builder (for grad school, law school, MBA’s, and joining the private sector education establishment) and the program isn’t at all what I imagined it to be (though I think part of my imagining was fantasy, and that the current goal is closer to the plans of Wendy Kopp & the KIPP folks). TFA shouldn’t and can’t be the means of providing the workforce for teaching the millions of kids.
Bill Gates has been quoted as saying that TFA should be a 5 year commitment, which would go a ways towards providing some of the possible benefit (attracting some of the “elite” to teaching) and diminishing some of the negatives (having kids actually gain the benefits of the knowledgeable, smart, 3rd year teacher, eliminating some who are looking for mere resume building)
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“Bill Gates has been quoted as saying that TFA should be a 5 year commitment, which would go a ways towards providing some of the possible benefit (attracting some of the “elite” to teaching) and diminishing some of the negatives (having kids actually gain the benefits of the knowledgeable, smart, 3rd year teacher, eliminating some who are looking for mere resume building)”
A 5-year commitment coupled with $30k in loan forgiveness (let’s say $6k a year?) would be very reasonable.
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cranberry said:
“I have heard that it can be hard to be hired by a public school if you have a master’s degree, because schools prefer to hire new teachers at lower salaries.”
I didn’t know that, but I had noted that a common pattern is:
1. Do BA
2. Get school job
3. Do MA.
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People have been looking at “Do they teach better after they have a Master’s?” and the answer seems to be “no”, and in particular “no” if the Master’s is an Ed Master’s. So I kinda think this system of giving raises will be struggled over and eventually go away.
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I’m just saying my sister has an Ivy League BA and after some interesting work in experiential education went to Ed school (and learned really interesting things though I’m sure it wasn’t the most rigorous program) and is/was a public high school teacher and now a principal in a public middle school in a pretty strange place in Colorado. I know everyone thinks kids from the Ivy League become consultants, doctors, lawyers and CEOs but many of them are just regular people who are smart or test well, or privileged, but want a regular life and are good at teaching and totally open to learning how to do it better! She did not do TFA by the way…maybe didn’t get in. But she’s a valuable part of the public ed system now. (and her school’s scores are going up!) Agree with what Grafton said: I’ve worked at Ivy League universities. Many people totally understand what they don’t know there. I’m just going to state I think TFA is crap except that it means that there’s something involving education that’s become a status symbol…maybe that’s not so bad?
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