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Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

140 points by andygcook 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rootusrootus 3y ago
Sounds like a good reason to continue the experiment. As long as we continue to insist on paying teachers as little as possible, it makes sense to lower the ridiculous educational requirements just to teach elementary school.
germinalphrase 3y ago
As a former high school teacher, I am in favor of reduced requirements to enter the profession; however, I taught in two states that supported these types of on ramps, and they didn’t seem to make a notable impact on applicant numbers (that is, out of the hundreds of educators I worked with over the years, I knew only one who came in via a non-traditional pathway after working in a different field (engineering)). That’s not the question the article is asking, but I’m skeptical that making it easier for professionals to career switch into teaching is going to cause any meaningful number of them to do so.
- lolinder 3y ago
  I would love to teach high school but there would need to be some major changes to the system before I would be willing to. What I really want is to be able to teach the kind of CS courses that I took in high school—they were optional classes that kids chose to be in because they were interested, and the teacher had full discretion on what to teach. Unfortunately, that's not the typical high school class, and most teachers have to teach at least a few mandatory classes with curricula dictated at the state level. Props to the teachers who are willing to deal with reluctant students and enabling parents, but I would go crazy in that environment, and I've had bad experiences trying to teach curricula handed down from on high.
  - jbellis 3y ago
    And the GPA-grubbing is ridiculous to the point of being comical.
- derefr 3y ago
  Teacher pay is too low for anyone to want to take a teaching job when they have professional qualifications that would allow them to work a much better-paid job. (Especially when getting those skills also involved paying hundreds of thousands in student loans to a university. You need to earn your way out of that hole, and not working the best-paying job you can would be prolonging that debt!) But I think the article is suggesting something different: that teachers could and should be hired fresh out of high school, when they don’t yet have any of those other professional skills — or the debt involved in acquiring them — and then simply given on-the-job training. Quote: > Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers.
  - dan-robertson 3y ago
    How much approximately do you think a teacher gets paid? Obviously it depends on specifics so maybe say whether you’re imagining a city centre / suburban / rural school, and whether the state/district is wealthy and whether it’s a high school or whatever. I have some guesses in my head for something like ‘high school teacher in moderately wealthy Chicago suburb’ (I haven’t written the number here because I don’t want to anchor you) though I don’t have a great sense for how many jobs like that there are in the US. Above base pay there can also be more for helping with extracurriculars, potentially a defined benefit pension, and after settling in teachers will have a lot of free time/vacation not spent planning lessons. The amount of pay may not excite you if you’re a professional software developer at a well-paying company in the US, but I’m not sure that a more typical professional job would be “much better-paid”.
    - germinalphrase 3y ago
      I taught in a moderately wealthy suburb of Minneapolis. With ten years of experience, my comp was about 50k. While I have heard stories of teachers from prior generations receiving somewhat lavish defined benefit pensions, I don’t believe that has been an option for new teachers in decades. With regard to vacations, we had the school calendar vacations (which is fine), but otherwise I accrued about 8 days of PTO per year without any other sort of vacation/parent leave/etc. When our first child was born, I burned all three weeks of accrued PTO and was back on the job. By comparison, when I left teaching - I doubled my income, work about 20 percent fewer hours a week, have comparable healthcare, unlimited PTO, took 8 weeks paid parental leave with our second child, and have much less day-to-day stress. Teaching isn’t a salt mine, but - in my experience - it wasn’t a cushy job either.
- jackfoxy 3y ago
  It may not make any significant change in the numbers applying for k-12 positions, but do people really need to go through the torture, indoctrination, and expense of graduate school to teach k-12? Won't a handful of undergrad courses, seminars, and internships suffice in addition to whatever other degree is pursued? As it is now wannabe teachers already have too much time, the most precious of all commodities, invested in ramping up to teaching.
  - scruple 3y ago
    Teachers need graduate degrees to teach K-12?
    - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
      It depends on the state, but in some cases yes. In New York there are undergraduate programs which provide an "initial certification", which is sufficient to teach in a public school for X number of years. However, you must obtain a masters degree before the initial certification expires.
      - scruple 3y ago
        I Googled around a bit. Looks like Connecticut, Maryland, and New York requires them and a small set of other states lock specific licensures behind graduate degrees. I sincerely had no idea this was happening. I have young kids, in California, but we haven't hit kindergarten yet.
        wharvle 3y ago
        States that don’t require higher degrees often have a wall on the pay scale that’s hit early in one’s career, without a graduate degree. What’s weird about the market for teaching master’s degrees, at least (idk about PhDs) is that this generates a ton of demand for them, but it makes no difference how good the program is. Teachers don’t care because they don’t really matter that much for improving teaching skill. Schools don’t care—pay bump is the same no matter what. This has all the effects one might guess on the quality of these programs—almost all are very easy, because nobody involved cares how rigorous they are, and one party would generally prefer they not be very difficult. Whole thing’s a joke, total waste of money and teachers’ time.
- jbellis 3y ago
  I was taking time off in 2022 when my daughter's high school CS teacher quit (to take a job at Microsoft). I volunteered to step in until they could find a qualified replacement. It ended up working out, but it was a pretty big problem to have an unlicensed teacher in the school. They ultimately had me enroll as a substitute who just happened to get assigned to the same classes every day, but they said if I wanted to come back the following year I'd need to become officially licensed. I could see myself teaching high school in retirement. Helps the community, keeps you busy, and your summers are open. But not if I have to jump through a bunch of make-work hoops for the privilege of helping out.
  - lurking15 3y ago
    > I could see myself teaching high school in retirement. My calc & discrete math teacher in HS was a retired guy from bell labs, apparently knew claude shannon. He had made a bunch of money doing that and was just teaching at the HS as a philanthropic service in old age. He wrote & printed the textbooks we used. Practically every other teacher seemed inadequate afterwards. Oddly enough I had a professor in college who was from bell labs too, absolutely brilliant too and taught in the same, in some way brutal, style too.
  - downrightmike 3y ago
    Just work at a community college, you just need a relevant masters degree.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  Maybe not significant numbers, but my wife and I have both thought about switching (along with a move to a lower COL area) as an exit ramp from the corporate rat race. I have a BA in economics and a 20+ year career in software. As best we can tell, in order to teach middle or high school in VA (I’d want to teach CS/IT) I need to obtain a Masters in Education to do so. Spending $30k+ on a post-graduate degree for a career with starting pay 1/4 of my current income doesn’t make any sense. If there was an on-job path to certification it would be viable. But the expense of taking a year off work to get a Masters pretty well kills it.
  - notmyuserlogin 3y ago
    I did an online masters in teaching while working full time for less than $6K. When figuring out costs be sure to remember that you pay tuition for your observations and student teaching as well as your regular class time. Those add up to 4-5 months of full time unpaid work in a classroom.
pard68 3y ago
Makes sense to me. I attended public school all my life. Everyone I knew more or less had the same out look on formal education, means to an end, can I just get the spark notes, thanks. In college I interacted with a strange life form called a "homeschooler". Almost without exception they were smarter, better read, and had a desire to learn. Educating children seems to be far more than degrees, licenses, and CE credits.
- khzw8yyy 3y ago
  You interacted with a homeschooled student who made it to college. Huge difference compared to the average homeschooled student.
  - pard68 3y ago
    Do you have any studies or sources to show outcomes of homeschooled children? I've since met many outside of college, they all seem far better off than the average high schooler I knew as a kid.
    - 2020aj 3y ago
      Is the average high schooler you knew as a kid representative of the types of people you now meet in your circles? Each stage of our lives is its own sort of selection bias.
  - adolph 3y ago
    Presumably there is a similar difference between the average non-homeschooled student and the population that made it to college.
    - ghufran_syed 3y ago
      as there is between the average high school student and those who make it to college?
  - bitzun 3y ago
    I was completely unschooled prior to college and while I did fine in school I was generally very poorly adjusted. I actually don't know a single homeschooled person who came of age nearly as prepared for the world as anyone I know who went to primary school.
CoastalCoder 3y ago
Maybe public education is so broken in the U.S. (e.g., No Child Left Behind) that this issue is just statistical noise in the outcomes? I'm mostly going on the stories from a teacher relative; I'm 99% speculating.
aczerepinski 3y ago
This is good news for me personally. I'd like to make money in tech for perhaps 10 more years and then teach music (and comp sci?) in a public high school. I have advanced degrees in music but no education degree. Under current rules I'd have to stick to teaching at the college level which doesn't appeal to me because the degree is a bad financial decision for the students working towards it.
hkt 3y ago
Whatever can be measured can be managed, but not everything that counts can be counted. I'd be interested to see international comparisons and closer attention paid to more subjects than English and maths, as well as psychosocial development, classroom environment, and student mental health.
rr808 3y ago
With working from home getting popular, even fewer people want to be a teacher. 5 days a week starting at 8am. Not going to happen.
- trealira 3y ago
  Maybe in the future, to entice people to become public teachers, or at least to stem the bleeding of current teachers, they'll allow teachers to work less. Instead of one teacher teaching a class/subject (like math) 5 days a week, two teachers will rotate, one teaching math 3 days per week, and the other teaching 2 days per week. But then, that would require them to double their supply of teachers, which seems unlikely to happen.
  - ejb999 3y ago
    work less? in my state they are contractually obligated to work just over 900 hours a year - a typical FT employee is expected to work more than twice that (1920 - 2000 hours) depending on vacation benefit. I don't think teachers pay is all that low (at least in my state), when you factor in they only work 50% as many hours - on an hourly basis, teachers (except perhaps the brand new ones) make pretty good hourly rate, full benefits, and are usually able to retire a lot earlier than regular folks, and with a defined-benefit pension and full healthcare. Make them work even less? No thanks.
    - Detrytus 3y ago
      > contractually obligated to work just over 900 hours a year Are you making a mistake to confuse hours spent teaching in class with working hours? Teachers have a lot of other duties outside the classroom, preparing the lesson plans and grading papers being the most obvious examples.
- kube-system 3y ago
  But the flexibility during the summer beats many other jobs.
  - 3y ago
dboreham 3y ago
Underlying problem: people don't want to pay teachers enough.
- gbacon 3y ago
  Compensation is a vector. Teachers who are government employees receive their cash compensation, paid leave, summers off, job security through formalized tenure, generous pensions, generous health care benefits, and some lifetime benefits if they reach retirement age.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Have no fear, the requirements to receive the benefits is rising; such as 30y teaching not before 68yo. When my SO went full time as a public school teacher her salary only modestly contributed to our retirement, healthcare costs, and covered childcare for the kids too young for school. Our bank account didn't receive enough money to cover the other bills when I was briefly laid off. She considered teaching a net loss and didn't renew her contract.
    - wharvle 3y ago
      My wife taught for about 10 years. Can confirm, at least in our state, the benefits are not the “cushy” state employee benefits that many suppose exist (actually, our state employees have trash benefits, too—you go federal if you want good bennies in that sort of job, here). Only way to have decent benefits in education is to go into admin (supers and assistant-supers get totally different, and far better, benefits in many districts—go figure) She left teaching for WFH, a ~40% total-comp increase, and a far better work environment. Turns out the skills and experiences a good teacher tends to accumulate are really valuable to companies.
  - photochemsyn 3y ago
    Looks like a permanent rentier gig these days - how many teachers are earning enough money to buy their own home in the community in which they are teaching? If that's not a plausible outcome, if living in a rental unit your whole life is part of the job description, then it's not an attractive deal.
mjburgess 3y ago
I'm a strong advocate for scrapping all degree requirements to every profession, perhaps even in law (ie., banning most employers from asking). This shifts the burden on to the employer to make a reliable assessment of the applicant. This would have two, imv, favourable effects: 1) a university education would compete on its merits as education with all alternatives; 2) breaking the rent-seeking monopolies universities have on entrance to the jobs market. The law would have to be carefully crafted -- but we're long past the era when a degree was predictive of anything. It was always a positional good, and if 50% of the next generation have one there's no signal within the noise anymore. And of course, it was always as much about 'keeping the rifraff out' as it was in selecting good candidates. For certain professions, eg., teaching/drs/etc., i think it makes more sense for the state to have 'licence to practice' certifications/exams -- rather than assume that a degree is such a licence.
- firtoz 3y ago
  It was great for selecting quality candidates until the education system got heavily abused and mismanaged and corrupted with maladjusted incentives, may it RIP.
- kube-system 3y ago
  > This shifts the burden on to the employer to make a reliable assessment of the applicant. It shifts the burden on the employer to make an alternative assessment of the applicant. If what they're using now isn't reliable, but convenient, why would any alternative be?
  - liquidpele 3y ago
    There is often a very technology and IT centric viewpoint on this website. This is often the case anyway with technology positions, but for other things like accounting, medicine, law, etc formal education is more required.
    - mjburgess 3y ago
      If you wont pass an accountancy exam without formal education, and i'd say most wouldnt, then they'll get one. The number of applicants who succeed in such cases, at getting through without formal education, will be very small. And i'd be 90% of those cases, that applicant is way above their peers in performance -- ie., worth having let it
api 3y ago
Piecemeal, perhaps, but I wonder if this would scale. A whole lot of the HR problems that things like degrees and certifications solve are problems that happen at scale. If you suddenly drop the licensing requirements for teaching, you'd now have a new job available to anyone in the job market that would start attracting different profiles of people than you will get when emergency hiring teachers. Also emergency hired teachers probably come in via social networks of existing teachers, parents, etc.
- jbellis 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure that "too many applicants" counts as a first-world problem for most schools.
djhope99 3y ago
The UK always had a program that allowed you to become a teacher without a degree. It involves a diploma followed by gaining QTLS (Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills) status I believe. Is this not the case in the USA?
- pard68 3y ago
  It'll vary by state.
- kube-system 3y ago
  Generally in the US you need a bachelors degree and a teaching certificate. But requirements are set individually by the states and vary widely.
mberning 3y ago
A lot of my teacher acquaintances have this mistaken idea that they should be paid a lot more because they are “teaching the next generation” or any other variation of that delusion. They don’t seem to understand that the reason they don’t make a lot is because a lot of people can do the job. As we can see from this story.
- wharvle 3y ago
  TFA: > Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors. (Borrowing reasthenotes1’s quote elsewhere in the thread) What you wrote may or may not be true, but this study doesn’t do much to support it.
  - mberning 3y ago
    It’s unambiguously true. Look at how many people graduate with an education major vs other majors such as mathematics or engineering. If you deny that a mathematics degree is significantly more difficult than an education degree then I have nothing more to say. The story supports the idea that many people could be childhood educators based on the fact that the program was not scrapped, the degreeless teachers weren’t sacked, and the customers were apparently satisfied.
    - wharvle 3y ago
      “Tested grades and subjects” includes math basically everywhere. Those weren’t considered here. Again, you may be right, but this study doesn’t really support what you’re claiming.
cyanydeez 3y ago
now control for salaries
gunalx 3y ago
I'm sceptical, isn't the take from this we should have that we need to improve the education needed for educators. In my childhood, the only teachers that did not make life hell for me where the ones that actually had decent education, and was not just extra hires.
- drpossum 3y ago
  That's literally the opposite reading? The teachers who got better education didn't perform that much better, so the education needed does not need to improve. Based on that article the argument would be "if you want to raise the bar for teacher education you need to improve the level of what and how it is being taught".
analog31 3y ago
It seems to me that we've already gutted the requirements for a teaching degree -- it's one of the easiest college majors. The primary hurdle is surviving the first couple of years in the classroom.
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
I am very close to obtaining an elementary school teaching degree (46 of 49 credits completed), and as of this year I am a full time teacher at a private school (which doesn't have to care whether I officially have a license). My masters program is considered among the best in the state. Unfortunately, I don't have many good things to say about my masters program. The majority of my classes have been interesting but useless in a real classroom. Teaching is just one of those things that you largely learn by doing. Teaching does take a lot of skill and practice—I am surrounded at work by more experienced colleagues, and watching them always leaves me impressed—but I don't think it's something you can learn from a textbook. Similarly, the licensure exams are just awful, at least in New York. I will leave you with a real practice test question from the official preparation materials. This is for the content knowledge test on "Science and Technology". ---------- A construction company is evaluating proposals for the creation of a new playground. They are using the following scale to assess the relevant criteria: +--------------+------------------------+ | Scale number | Scale score assessment | +--------------+------------------------+ | 1 | Far below standards | | 2 | Below Standard | | 3 | Meeting standard | | 4 | Exceeding standard | +--------------+------------------------+ Use the chart below to answer the question that follows: +----------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | Criteria | Company 1 | Company 2 | Company 3 | Company 4 | +----------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | Safety | 3 | 4 | 3 | 1 | | Quality | 3 | 2 | 3 | 4 | | Creativity | 4 | 3 | 3 | 4 | | Sustainability | 3 | 2 | 2 | 4 | | Utility | 3 | 3 | 4 | 4 | +----------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ According to the evaluation detailed in the chart, which company should be awarded the project? ---------- Ready for the answer? Take a moment to think about it before looking... The answer key says it's company four, because they have "the highest overall score. We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score."
- red_admiral 3y ago
  That seems to match some real-world examples. "plug doors" anyone?
karaterobot 3y ago
Some additional context from TFA, which is actually pretty insightful. > One preliminary explanation from the New Jersey study was that the emergency licensed teachers were working in schools that had a record of helping students make strong academic gains. It’s possible that the schools had supports in place, such as teacher coaching, a strong curriculum or something else that compensated for less training... Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. > There’s some evidence that teacher licensure tests are mildly accurate predictors of who will be a good educator. All else equal, a school would be better off selecting candidates with a higher test score, especially if they’re going to be teaching math or science. But that general rule would mischaracterize a lot of teachers — some test well but don’t have great classroom management or interpersonal skills, while others may not test well but are effective at working with children. I'm not an expert, but my impression of modern classrooms is that teachers don't have as much leeway to choose what or how they teach, compared to, say 50 years ago. They have a strictly defined curriculum to get through, and they're generally spending a lot of their classroom hours teaching to standardized tests. Might the difference in "classroom management" skill, which is evidently untested in teacher licensing, be the most significant thing left that can make one teacher better than another? That is, if we make teachers (essentially) read from the same script, maybe it's all in the delivery? And if this is untested in teacher licensing, maybe it's somewhat evenly distributed between licensed and unlicensed teachers?
WalterBright 3y ago
For humans, being able to teach is an innate capability. After all, we've been able to teach our children for 100,000 years before schools existed. Today, parents routinely teach their kids things like reading and arithmetic. The best teachers I had were professors at university, and they never had a day of teacher training. They simply knew the subject material. What skills a masters degree in education confers is a mystery to me.
vcg3rd 3y ago
Maybe it's actually liscensed educators are no more effective than unlicensed teachers.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deepsquirrelnet 3y ago
For me personally, I learned and performed much better under teachers that I knew had some passion for the subjects they taught. Unfortunately that’s more difficult to measure.
mdip 3y ago
Both of my children were taught by an educator without a degree until 6th and 9th grade. Both entered the private school system/public school system and have scored two years of perfect grades so far. We were a pretty laid-back home schooling family. My kids didn't spend all day nose-in-books, watching documentaries in the afternoon between violin, piano and Spanish lessons. Up until this year it was a closely guarded secret how much time my kids spent "in home school." Had I let my family or non-homeschooling friends know how much actual formal class time there was, I would have probably been derided as a terrible parent. Now that they're sailing through school -- not just doing well, but generally underwhelmed by the difficulty of the material -- I'm not so shy. They had, on a really good day about 2 hours of actual, formal, class-time with homework. The vast majority of the time, it was under an hour of mom-led learning followed by under an hour of homework, done in one room, alternating kids between homework/study but often times with both kids participating in each other's lessons (why not?). Aside from having to be single-income, and except for the "they're your kids so they aren't as easy to teach" problems[0], it wasn't difficult at all. Hell, the vast majority of the time -- especially since I work remotely -- it was downright awesome. The above paragraphs might make it sound like I'm saying "Screw Teachers, their job is easy, any idiot could do it!" Obviously, it's much easier to teach two children than it is twenty-ish. Obviously, being that they're your own children, you have lack the complexity of dealing with parents, administration and politics. The reason "it worked for us so easily" is almost entirely due to these factors. I think about how, one year, we decided to ditch the math curriculum we were using for my son -- he was struggling, we found something better for him and within a week he was enjoying learning it. Having just the two kids meant we could make sure they were enjoying learning. When kids want to learn something, all you really have to do is point them toward "how." You're not going to get 25 kids -- some who come from tough home situations -- to all enjoy learning. That said, I've never understood why (at least in the past) substitute teachers[1] never required degrees and were plenty effective, homeschooling is allowed without restriction, registration, or any requirement to prove you are actually home schooling to teach from a book basic things that every adult -- at one point -- learned. That sounds dismissive -- I'd imagine the vast majority of the job isn't that, and I have no interest in becoming a teacher because of those factors (difficult children, parents, administration, government) but I'd be willing to bet there are a lot of very qualified adults who would, but can't, because of degree requirements. [0] My daughter was famous for breakdowns during math lessons. She can be emotional, but trust me, she's not breaking down in front of her Math teacher at school, today. Incidentally, despite her claiming to hate math all throughout home-schooling days, now that she's past Arithmetic, it's her favorite subject. [1] Yes, most of the time, that's a single-day activity. We had one for three months, once.
readthenotes1 3y ago
"Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors." That is, they cannot speak to how effective the teachers were as educators, only how disruptive they were as employees.
- germinalphrase 3y ago
  Assessing educator effectiveness is not a solved problem. For instance, the Gates Foundation made a full throated effort to research and develop a quantifiable measure and failed. In the end, they released a set of holistic, observable behaviors/practices that they believe are associated with teacher effectiveness. It’s a hard problem.
  - readthenotes1 3y ago
    I completely agree. For one thing, they're probably looking at the wrong things since student effectiveness will dominate teacher effectiveness, and that is where the hard problems come (knowing what to look at, what to measure, proxy measurement error, and measurement distinction)
hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
Licenses are more to protect the interest groups and deflect legal fights.
syntaxing 3y ago
The school district I went to had a policy that the teachers are required to have a related masters degree in the subject they’re teaching. It was a great school district since the teachers were all formerly non teachers at one point. My social studies teacher was a lawyer before, physics teacher actually published some papers as a physicists. The downside is the property tax ballooned out of control but I got a great education.
- dchichkov 3y ago
  A state or a small country can afford maybe a few schools like that. You need state sponsorship, endowment money or a district where property values ballooned out of control. And with a lot of money at stake, it's very likely that school administration compensation will be ballooning instead. Connecting schools with a university system could be a more viable option. Make it easy to teach in a nearby school, pay reasonably for tuition and a university can be a source of PhD students and postdocs that could get some easy pocket money as guest lecturers. I think, it's also refreshing for PhD students and postdocs to give classes to younger kids.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  Entire states are like this, and it doesn't work out that way at scale. Teachers get degrees to teach, and are buried under a mountain of debt while not being paid for it. On top of that, they need to take "continuing education" credits, which ostensibly is a way to stay on top of teaching trends but is really a racket for the teaching-adjacent industry. I don't think my state required the masters degree, but pay scales definitely were weighed in favor of it. It certainly didn't make for better teachers.
  - peterfirefly 3y ago
    Entire countries do this. Seems to work fine for them.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      Finland has generalist with special degrees doing Elementary school. After that the teachers have degree in subject or adjacent subject. Plus pedagogy. On other hand education is state paid so there isn't huge loans to pay off. It did not do badly in past. But less resources and more non-natives have taken a toll on results.
growingkittens 3y ago
The long-term impact is much more ambiguous to measure. I paid particular attention in school when a teacher would explain why they were trying to teach us something. I noticed the same patterns of teaching among different teachers in the same school system, and how it all worked together to reinforce the skills we needed. (Note: many of my peers experienced the "extra" work as pointless, because they didn't understand the long-term implications). Teachers who don't understand educational theory can't work as part of an educational system without additional training. In the meantime, their students miss out on long-term skill building. This situation makes me think of technical debt. A short-term fix with long-term, ambiguous problems that are difficult to unravel.
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  What’s a concrete example of one of the explanations for a reason you were given for your being taught something?
  - growingkittens 3y ago
    Most of what I remember involves "transferability" - the ability to take a skill in one area and apply it in a different context. One way to teach this involves combining subjects, such as practicing reading and comprehension skills in math class with word problems. There is a keyword I am forgetting which would make this comment easier to answer in detail. If I remember it I will post again.
  - xboxnolifes 3y ago
    Not who you replied to, but the bad one I always got was "You'll need to know it for college".
- sesm 3y ago
  Good point. In short, I would rephrase it as "if your measurement doesn't show the difference between trained and untrained teachers, maybe your measurement is wrong?" There 2 other plausible hypothesis that the article ignores: 1. What if untrained teachers are effective because they learn on the job from trained teachers? Which means that you have to have certain % of trained teachers to keep the system alive. 2. What if trained teachers become less effective because they drop their standards looking at how untrained ones work? This is a common phenomenon at workplaces, and I've seen it happen in software development many times.
GlibMonkeyDeath 3y ago
Here is the study for Massachusetts (saving you several layers of summary articles): https://wheelockpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Emergency-License-Y2-Report.pdf https://wheelockpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/... In every category, emergency/provisional licensed median values were lower than licensed teachers, including performance evaluations, although these results didn't reach 95% statistical significance of rejecting the null hypothesis. Even if they didn't reach P < 0.05, when all of the results point in one direction, I am not so sure I would completely agree with the top-level headline as it is stated.
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  The first plot in your link certainly looks inconclusive. It doesn’t look very close at all to meeting the statistical significance bar and I think it would be an error to conclude that it shows the emergency/provisionally licensed teachers were worse. But I wonder if other things might be going on, eg maybe COVID meant the emergency/provisionally licensed teachers were also disadvantaged from having less practice. And on the other hand, lots of them will have gotten much of the requirements for a license so it doesn’t really show much about the long term effects of changing the license requirements.
iaw 3y ago
I have a family member who was hired as an Emergency teacher over 20 years ago. They've since become fully credentialed, obtained their masters in education, taught masters students, and organized a particular program/subject at the district level. Speaking with them, their experience has been the core driver of a successful teacher is primarily whether they want to be there and care about the students success. Of course, when they were first hired they spent all of their free time crafting lessons plans for a subject they basically failed in high school. Studying the textbook and relevant material so they could teach it.
sgnelson 3y ago
Those few who are willing to go take a low salary to go deal with all the issues of the modern education system are just as good as those who are willing to go take a low salary and deal with all the issues of the modern education system, but have to jump through a few more hoops. I'm shocked. Let's face it, those who are willing to teach, and are probably leaving decent careers to do so, have a decent chance of being an okay teacher, because they probably have an idea of what they're getting into, and are willing to work hard. ie they WANT to be teachers. Of course, if we just paid teachers more, you'd probably have a higher number of qualified candidates, but that seems like that's too hard of a thing to do?
billdueber 3y ago
Reminder to everyone commenting here: you are not an average student. The hard part of teaching is not coming up with dynamite lessons for kids who are smart and want to learn and are capable of doing so and aren’t hungry. Anyone can do that. Well, almost anyone. Way back in the olden times, 5 to 10% of people went to school, and it worked really well for them. Now everyone goes to school, and it works really well for about 5% of us.
- paulcole 3y ago
  I promise you, this site is not as special as you think it is. The majority of people here are incredibly average (like me!), just fortunate to be born at the right time, be exposed to technology at the right time, get a few other lucky breaks, and of course put some work in. It’s super easy to convince yourself that because you’re successful you must be special. Remember that people tend to ascribe their successes to themselves and their failures to someone else.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    You would be average if you actually thought this site doesn't have a selection bias out of the world population. If you think HN averages out to a middle of the pack student, people who spend their free time reading text, you have quite the social bubble around you. There's also like 25 $1b+ founder/ceo's out of 50k.
    - paulcole 3y ago
      Believe it or not the world has a lot of people who are above average whose lives don’t revolve around computers. There’s just as many losers here as anywhere.
      - reducesuffering 3y ago
        First part, of course, but since HN is only like 50k that doesn’t say much about HN. Second part, there can forsure be many “losers” here but it’s quite ignorant to think there’s the same percentage struggling in math classes as the general population. Think about it. If you took 100 HN’ers where do you think they skew on succeeding on math tests or even taking classes like Calculus compared to gen pop? The average person even in the US doesn’t have a Bachelors degree. Do you think that applies to HN? Or that it’s not correlative with educational success?
more_corn 3y ago
Low bar
CharlesW 3y ago
Note that The 74 is an anti-union, pro-privatization, conservative advocacy (disguised as news) site funded by groups like The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation. https://truthout.org/articles/campbell-brown-the-new-leader-of-the-propaganda-arm-of-school-privatization/ https://truthout.org/articles/campbell-brown-the-new-leader-...
- throw10920 3y ago
  [flagged]
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Is the data they uncover dangerous?
  - msrenee 3y ago
    I think the implication is that it may be misrepresented or cherry-picked in a way that strengthens their argument against public education. Not that every outlet isn't biased in some way, but this is a group with a known strong bias.
- Someone 3y ago
  I think that explains my observations. FTA: “New Jersey’s waiver policy was similar. Candidates could earn a temporary credential before passing the normal licensure exams or completing a teacher preparation program. The licenses were good for one year, at which point candidates would need to go back, pass the tests and complete their training” So, those people would have a job for a year, but in that time also would study to pass “the normal licensure exams”? I would think that strongly selects for people motivated to teach. Also, did they really have to _earn_ a temporary credential? The answer to that question seems to be “yes”. Google gives me https://www.nj.gov/education/covid19/teacherresources/instructionalCEtemp.shtml https://www.nj.gov/education/covid19/teacherresources/instru..., which says: “Candidates who have met all requirements for a CE or Certificate of Eligibility with Advanced Standing (CEAS) but have not yet passed the basic skills test and/or test of subject matter knowledge are eligible for the Temporary CE” Doesn’t that mean people who got that waiver are educated as teachers, but haven’t managed to pass all exams (most of them likely not because they can’t pass them but because there wasn’t any opportunity to do them)? I couldn’t find the regulation for Massachusetts, so I couldn’t check whether it had similar provisions (https://www.doe.mass.edu/licensure/emergency/ https://www.doe.mass.edu/licensure/emergency/ Probably comes close, but it mentions a program extension, and becomes confusing to me because of that) Also FTA: “Starting June 2020, Massachusetts began temporarily letting anyone with a bachelor’s degree teach” So, it’s not “without degrees”, but “without teaching degrees”, at least in Massachusetts (the article isn’t clear as to whether New Jersey had a similar restriction, but it had. See the link above)
mplewis 3y ago
There’s obviously no way this finding is true.

140 points by andygcook 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Sounds like a good reason to continue the experiment. As long as we continue to insist on paying teachers as little as possible, it makes sense to lower the ridiculous educational requirements just to teach elementary school.

germinalphrase 3y ago

As a former high school teacher, I am in favor of reduced requirements to enter the profession; however, I taught in two states that supported these types of on ramps, and they didn’t seem to make a notable impact on applicant numbers (that is, out of the hundreds of educators I worked with over the years, I knew only one who came in via a non-traditional pathway after working in a different field (engineering)). That’s not the question the article is asking, but I’m skeptical that making it easier for professionals to career switch into teaching is going to cause any meaningful number of them to do so.

lolinder 3y ago
I would love to teach high school but there would need to be some major changes to the system before I would be willing to. What I really want is to be able to teach the kind of CS courses that I took in high school—they were optional classes that kids chose to be in because they were interested, and the teacher had full discretion on what to teach. Unfortunately, that's not the typical high school class, and most teachers have to teach at least a few mandatory classes with curricula dictated at the state level. Props to the teachers who are willing to deal with reluctant students and enabling parents, but I would go crazy in that environment, and I've had bad experiences trying to teach curricula handed down from on high.
- jbellis 3y ago
  And the GPA-grubbing is ridiculous to the point of being comical.
derefr 3y ago
Teacher pay is too low for anyone to want to take a teaching job when they have professional qualifications that would allow them to work a much better-paid job. (Especially when getting those skills also involved paying hundreds of thousands in student loans to a university. You need to earn your way out of that hole, and not working the best-paying job you can would be prolonging that debt!) But I think the article is suggesting something different: that teachers could and should be hired fresh out of high school, when they don’t yet have any of those other professional skills — or the debt involved in acquiring them — and then simply given on-the-job training. Quote: > Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers.
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  How much approximately do you think a teacher gets paid? Obviously it depends on specifics so maybe say whether you’re imagining a city centre / suburban / rural school, and whether the state/district is wealthy and whether it’s a high school or whatever. I have some guesses in my head for something like ‘high school teacher in moderately wealthy Chicago suburb’ (I haven’t written the number here because I don’t want to anchor you) though I don’t have a great sense for how many jobs like that there are in the US. Above base pay there can also be more for helping with extracurriculars, potentially a defined benefit pension, and after settling in teachers will have a lot of free time/vacation not spent planning lessons. The amount of pay may not excite you if you’re a professional software developer at a well-paying company in the US, but I’m not sure that a more typical professional job would be “much better-paid”.
  - germinalphrase 3y ago
    I taught in a moderately wealthy suburb of Minneapolis. With ten years of experience, my comp was about 50k. While I have heard stories of teachers from prior generations receiving somewhat lavish defined benefit pensions, I don’t believe that has been an option for new teachers in decades. With regard to vacations, we had the school calendar vacations (which is fine), but otherwise I accrued about 8 days of PTO per year without any other sort of vacation/parent leave/etc. When our first child was born, I burned all three weeks of accrued PTO and was back on the job. By comparison, when I left teaching - I doubled my income, work about 20 percent fewer hours a week, have comparable healthcare, unlimited PTO, took 8 weeks paid parental leave with our second child, and have much less day-to-day stress. Teaching isn’t a salt mine, but - in my experience - it wasn’t a cushy job either.
jackfoxy 3y ago
It may not make any significant change in the numbers applying for k-12 positions, but do people really need to go through the torture, indoctrination, and expense of graduate school to teach k-12? Won't a handful of undergrad courses, seminars, and internships suffice in addition to whatever other degree is pursued? As it is now wannabe teachers already have too much time, the most precious of all commodities, invested in ramping up to teaching.
- scruple 3y ago
  Teachers need graduate degrees to teach K-12?
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    It depends on the state, but in some cases yes. In New York there are undergraduate programs which provide an "initial certification", which is sufficient to teach in a public school for X number of years. However, you must obtain a masters degree before the initial certification expires.
    - scruple 3y ago
      I Googled around a bit. Looks like Connecticut, Maryland, and New York requires them and a small set of other states lock specific licensures behind graduate degrees. I sincerely had no idea this was happening. I have young kids, in California, but we haven't hit kindergarten yet.
      - wharvle 3y ago
        States that don’t require higher degrees often have a wall on the pay scale that’s hit early in one’s career, without a graduate degree. What’s weird about the market for teaching master’s degrees, at least (idk about PhDs) is that this generates a ton of demand for them, but it makes no difference how good the program is. Teachers don’t care because they don’t really matter that much for improving teaching skill. Schools don’t care—pay bump is the same no matter what. This has all the effects one might guess on the quality of these programs—almost all are very easy, because nobody involved cares how rigorous they are, and one party would generally prefer they not be very difficult. Whole thing’s a joke, total waste of money and teachers’ time.
jbellis 3y ago
I was taking time off in 2022 when my daughter's high school CS teacher quit (to take a job at Microsoft). I volunteered to step in until they could find a qualified replacement. It ended up working out, but it was a pretty big problem to have an unlicensed teacher in the school. They ultimately had me enroll as a substitute who just happened to get assigned to the same classes every day, but they said if I wanted to come back the following year I'd need to become officially licensed. I could see myself teaching high school in retirement. Helps the community, keeps you busy, and your summers are open. But not if I have to jump through a bunch of make-work hoops for the privilege of helping out.
- lurking15 3y ago
  > I could see myself teaching high school in retirement. My calc & discrete math teacher in HS was a retired guy from bell labs, apparently knew claude shannon. He had made a bunch of money doing that and was just teaching at the HS as a philanthropic service in old age. He wrote & printed the textbooks we used. Practically every other teacher seemed inadequate afterwards. Oddly enough I had a professor in college who was from bell labs too, absolutely brilliant too and taught in the same, in some way brutal, style too.
- downrightmike 3y ago
  Just work at a community college, you just need a relevant masters degree.
alistairSH 3y ago
Maybe not significant numbers, but my wife and I have both thought about switching (along with a move to a lower COL area) as an exit ramp from the corporate rat race. I have a BA in economics and a 20+ year career in software. As best we can tell, in order to teach middle or high school in VA (I’d want to teach CS/IT) I need to obtain a Masters in Education to do so. Spending $30k+ on a post-graduate degree for a career with starting pay 1/4 of my current income doesn’t make any sense. If there was an on-job path to certification it would be viable. But the expense of taking a year off work to get a Masters pretty well kills it.
- notmyuserlogin 3y ago
  I did an online masters in teaching while working full time for less than $6K. When figuring out costs be sure to remember that you pay tuition for your observations and student teaching as well as your regular class time. Those add up to 4-5 months of full time unpaid work in a classroom.

pard68 3y ago

Makes sense to me. I attended public school all my life. Everyone I knew more or less had the same out look on formal education, means to an end, can I just get the spark notes, thanks. In college I interacted with a strange life form called a "homeschooler". Almost without exception they were smarter, better read, and had a desire to learn. Educating children seems to be far more than degrees, licenses, and CE credits.

khzw8yyy 3y ago
You interacted with a homeschooled student who made it to college. Huge difference compared to the average homeschooled student.
- pard68 3y ago
  Do you have any studies or sources to show outcomes of homeschooled children? I've since met many outside of college, they all seem far better off than the average high schooler I knew as a kid.
  - 2020aj 3y ago
    Is the average high schooler you knew as a kid representative of the types of people you now meet in your circles? Each stage of our lives is its own sort of selection bias.
- adolph 3y ago
  Presumably there is a similar difference between the average non-homeschooled student and the population that made it to college.
  - ghufran_syed 3y ago
    as there is between the average high school student and those who make it to college?
- bitzun 3y ago
  I was completely unschooled prior to college and while I did fine in school I was generally very poorly adjusted. I actually don't know a single homeschooled person who came of age nearly as prepared for the world as anyone I know who went to primary school.

CoastalCoder 3y ago

Maybe public education is so broken in the U.S. (e.g., No Child Left Behind) that this issue is just statistical noise in the outcomes? I'm mostly going on the stories from a teacher relative; I'm 99% speculating.

aczerepinski 3y ago

This is good news for me personally. I'd like to make money in tech for perhaps 10 more years and then teach music (and comp sci?) in a public high school. I have advanced degrees in music but no education degree. Under current rules I'd have to stick to teaching at the college level which doesn't appeal to me because the degree is a bad financial decision for the students working towards it.

hkt 3y ago

Whatever can be measured can be managed, but not everything that counts can be counted. I'd be interested to see international comparisons and closer attention paid to more subjects than English and maths, as well as psychosocial development, classroom environment, and student mental health.

rr808 3y ago

With working from home getting popular, even fewer people want to be a teacher. 5 days a week starting at 8am. Not going to happen.

trealira 3y ago
Maybe in the future, to entice people to become public teachers, or at least to stem the bleeding of current teachers, they'll allow teachers to work less. Instead of one teacher teaching a class/subject (like math) 5 days a week, two teachers will rotate, one teaching math 3 days per week, and the other teaching 2 days per week. But then, that would require them to double their supply of teachers, which seems unlikely to happen.
- ejb999 3y ago
  work less? in my state they are contractually obligated to work just over 900 hours a year - a typical FT employee is expected to work more than twice that (1920 - 2000 hours) depending on vacation benefit. I don't think teachers pay is all that low (at least in my state), when you factor in they only work 50% as many hours - on an hourly basis, teachers (except perhaps the brand new ones) make pretty good hourly rate, full benefits, and are usually able to retire a lot earlier than regular folks, and with a defined-benefit pension and full healthcare. Make them work even less? No thanks.
  - Detrytus 3y ago
    > contractually obligated to work just over 900 hours a year Are you making a mistake to confuse hours spent teaching in class with working hours? Teachers have a lot of other duties outside the classroom, preparing the lesson plans and grading papers being the most obvious examples.
kube-system 3y ago
But the flexibility during the summer beats many other jobs.
- 3y ago

dboreham 3y ago

Underlying problem: people don't want to pay teachers enough.

gbacon 3y ago
Compensation is a vector. Teachers who are government employees receive their cash compensation, paid leave, summers off, job security through formalized tenure, generous pensions, generous health care benefits, and some lifetime benefits if they reach retirement age.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Have no fear, the requirements to receive the benefits is rising; such as 30y teaching not before 68yo. When my SO went full time as a public school teacher her salary only modestly contributed to our retirement, healthcare costs, and covered childcare for the kids too young for school. Our bank account didn't receive enough money to cover the other bills when I was briefly laid off. She considered teaching a net loss and didn't renew her contract.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    My wife taught for about 10 years. Can confirm, at least in our state, the benefits are not the “cushy” state employee benefits that many suppose exist (actually, our state employees have trash benefits, too—you go federal if you want good bennies in that sort of job, here). Only way to have decent benefits in education is to go into admin (supers and assistant-supers get totally different, and far better, benefits in many districts—go figure) She left teaching for WFH, a ~40% total-comp increase, and a far better work environment. Turns out the skills and experiences a good teacher tends to accumulate are really valuable to companies.
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  Looks like a permanent rentier gig these days - how many teachers are earning enough money to buy their own home in the community in which they are teaching? If that's not a plausible outcome, if living in a rental unit your whole life is part of the job description, then it's not an attractive deal.

mjburgess 3y ago

I'm a strong advocate for scrapping all degree requirements to every profession, perhaps even in law (ie., banning most employers from asking). This shifts the burden on to the employer to make a reliable assessment of the applicant. This would have two, imv, favourable effects: 1) a university education would compete on its merits as education with all alternatives; 2) breaking the rent-seeking monopolies universities have on entrance to the jobs market. The law would have to be carefully crafted -- but we're long past the era when a degree was predictive of anything. It was always a positional good, and if 50% of the next generation have one there's no signal within the noise anymore. And of course, it was always as much about 'keeping the rifraff out' as it was in selecting good candidates. For certain professions, eg., teaching/drs/etc., i think it makes more sense for the state to have 'licence to practice' certifications/exams -- rather than assume that a degree is such a licence.

firtoz 3y ago
It was great for selecting quality candidates until the education system got heavily abused and mismanaged and corrupted with maladjusted incentives, may it RIP.
kube-system 3y ago
> This shifts the burden on to the employer to make a reliable assessment of the applicant. It shifts the burden on the employer to make an alternative assessment of the applicant. If what they're using now isn't reliable, but convenient, why would any alternative be?
- liquidpele 3y ago
  There is often a very technology and IT centric viewpoint on this website. This is often the case anyway with technology positions, but for other things like accounting, medicine, law, etc formal education is more required.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    If you wont pass an accountancy exam without formal education, and i'd say most wouldnt, then they'll get one. The number of applicants who succeed in such cases, at getting through without formal education, will be very small. And i'd be 90% of those cases, that applicant is way above their peers in performance -- ie., worth having let it

api 3y ago

Piecemeal, perhaps, but I wonder if this would scale. A whole lot of the HR problems that things like degrees and certifications solve are problems that happen at scale. If you suddenly drop the licensing requirements for teaching, you'd now have a new job available to anyone in the job market that would start attracting different profiles of people than you will get when emergency hiring teachers. Also emergency hired teachers probably come in via social networks of existing teachers, parents, etc.

jbellis 3y ago
I'm pretty sure that "too many applicants" counts as a first-world problem for most schools.

djhope99 3y ago

The UK always had a program that allowed you to become a teacher without a degree. It involves a diploma followed by gaining QTLS (Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills) status I believe. Is this not the case in the USA?

pard68 3y ago
It'll vary by state.
kube-system 3y ago
Generally in the US you need a bachelors degree and a teaching certificate. But requirements are set individually by the states and vary widely.

mberning 3y ago

A lot of my teacher acquaintances have this mistaken idea that they should be paid a lot more because they are “teaching the next generation” or any other variation of that delusion. They don’t seem to understand that the reason they don’t make a lot is because a lot of people can do the job. As we can see from this story.

wharvle 3y ago
TFA: > Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors. (Borrowing reasthenotes1’s quote elsewhere in the thread) What you wrote may or may not be true, but this study doesn’t do much to support it.
- mberning 3y ago
  It’s unambiguously true. Look at how many people graduate with an education major vs other majors such as mathematics or engineering. If you deny that a mathematics degree is significantly more difficult than an education degree then I have nothing more to say. The story supports the idea that many people could be childhood educators based on the fact that the program was not scrapped, the degreeless teachers weren’t sacked, and the customers were apparently satisfied.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    “Tested grades and subjects” includes math basically everywhere. Those weren’t considered here. Again, you may be right, but this study doesn’t really support what you’re claiming.

cyanydeez 3y ago

now control for salaries

gunalx 3y ago

I'm sceptical, isn't the take from this we should have that we need to improve the education needed for educators. In my childhood, the only teachers that did not make life hell for me where the ones that actually had decent education, and was not just extra hires.

drpossum 3y ago
That's literally the opposite reading? The teachers who got better education didn't perform that much better, so the education needed does not need to improve. Based on that article the argument would be "if you want to raise the bar for teacher education you need to improve the level of what and how it is being taught".

analog31 3y ago

It seems to me that we've already gutted the requirements for a teaching degree -- it's one of the easiest college majors. The primary hurdle is surviving the first couple of years in the classroom.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

I am very close to obtaining an elementary school teaching degree (46 of 49 credits completed), and as of this year I am a full time teacher at a private school (which doesn't have to care whether I officially have a license). My masters program is considered among the best in the state. Unfortunately, I don't have many good things to say about my masters program. The majority of my classes have been interesting but useless in a real classroom. Teaching is just one of those things that you largely learn by doing. Teaching does take a lot of skill and practice—I am surrounded at work by more experienced colleagues, and watching them always leaves me impressed—but I don't think it's something you can learn from a textbook. Similarly, the licensure exams are just awful, at least in New York. I will leave you with a real practice test question from the official preparation materials. This is for the content knowledge test on "Science and Technology". ---------- A construction company is evaluating proposals for the creation of a new playground. They are using the following scale to assess the relevant criteria: +--------------+------------------------+ | Scale number | Scale score assessment | +--------------+------------------------+ | 1 | Far below standards | | 2 | Below Standard | | 3 | Meeting standard | | 4 | Exceeding standard | +--------------+------------------------+ Use the chart below to answer the question that follows: +----------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | Criteria | Company 1 | Company 2 | Company 3 | Company 4 | +----------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | Safety | 3 | 4 | 3 | 1 | | Quality | 3 | 2 | 3 | 4 | | Creativity | 4 | 3 | 3 | 4 | | Sustainability | 3 | 2 | 2 | 4 | | Utility | 3 | 3 | 4 | 4 | +----------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ According to the evaluation detailed in the chart, which company should be awarded the project? ---------- Ready for the answer? Take a moment to think about it before looking... The answer key says it's company four, because they have "the highest overall score. We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score."

red_admiral 3y ago
That seems to match some real-world examples. "plug doors" anyone?

karaterobot 3y ago

Some additional context from TFA, which is actually pretty insightful. > One preliminary explanation from the New Jersey study was that the emergency licensed teachers were working in schools that had a record of helping students make strong academic gains. It’s possible that the schools had supports in place, such as teacher coaching, a strong curriculum or something else that compensated for less training... Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. > There’s some evidence that teacher licensure tests are mildly accurate predictors of who will be a good educator. All else equal, a school would be better off selecting candidates with a higher test score, especially if they’re going to be teaching math or science. But that general rule would mischaracterize a lot of teachers — some test well but don’t have great classroom management or interpersonal skills, while others may not test well but are effective at working with children. I'm not an expert, but my impression of modern classrooms is that teachers don't have as much leeway to choose what or how they teach, compared to, say 50 years ago. They have a strictly defined curriculum to get through, and they're generally spending a lot of their classroom hours teaching to standardized tests. Might the difference in "classroom management" skill, which is evidently untested in teacher licensing, be the most significant thing left that can make one teacher better than another? That is, if we make teachers (essentially) read from the same script, maybe it's all in the delivery? And if this is untested in teacher licensing, maybe it's somewhat evenly distributed between licensed and unlicensed teachers?

WalterBright 3y ago

For humans, being able to teach is an innate capability. After all, we've been able to teach our children for 100,000 years before schools existed. Today, parents routinely teach their kids things like reading and arithmetic. The best teachers I had were professors at university, and they never had a day of teacher training. They simply knew the subject material. What skills a masters degree in education confers is a mystery to me.

vcg3rd 3y ago

Maybe it's actually liscensed educators are no more effective than unlicensed teachers.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deepsquirrelnet 3y ago

For me personally, I learned and performed much better under teachers that I knew had some passion for the subjects they taught. Unfortunately that’s more difficult to measure.

mdip 3y ago

Both of my children were taught by an educator without a degree until 6th and 9th grade. Both entered the private school system/public school system and have scored two years of perfect grades so far. We were a pretty laid-back home schooling family. My kids didn't spend all day nose-in-books, watching documentaries in the afternoon between violin, piano and Spanish lessons. Up until this year it was a closely guarded secret how much time my kids spent "in home school." Had I let my family or non-homeschooling friends know how much actual formal class time there was, I would have probably been derided as a terrible parent. Now that they're sailing through school -- not just doing well, but generally underwhelmed by the difficulty of the material -- I'm not so shy. They had, on a really good day about 2 hours of actual, formal, class-time with homework. The vast majority of the time, it was under an hour of mom-led learning followed by under an hour of homework, done in one room, alternating kids between homework/study but often times with both kids participating in each other's lessons (why not?). Aside from having to be single-income, and except for the "they're your kids so they aren't as easy to teach" problems[0], it wasn't difficult at all. Hell, the vast majority of the time -- especially since I work remotely -- it was downright awesome. The above paragraphs might make it sound like I'm saying "Screw Teachers, their job is easy, any idiot could do it!" Obviously, it's much easier to teach two children than it is twenty-ish. Obviously, being that they're your own children, you have lack the complexity of dealing with parents, administration and politics. The reason "it worked for us so easily" is almost entirely due to these factors. I think about how, one year, we decided to ditch the math curriculum we were using for my son -- he was struggling, we found something better for him and within a week he was enjoying learning it. Having just the two kids meant we could make sure they were enjoying learning. When kids want to learn something, all you really have to do is point them toward "how." You're not going to get 25 kids -- some who come from tough home situations -- to all enjoy learning. That said, I've never understood why (at least in the past) substitute teachers[1] never required degrees and were plenty effective, homeschooling is allowed without restriction, registration, or any requirement to prove you are actually home schooling to teach from a book basic things that every adult -- at one point -- learned. That sounds dismissive -- I'd imagine the vast majority of the job isn't that, and I have no interest in becoming a teacher because of those factors (difficult children, parents, administration, government) but I'd be willing to bet there are a lot of very qualified adults who would, but can't, because of degree requirements. [0] My daughter was famous for breakdowns during math lessons. She can be emotional, but trust me, she's not breaking down in front of her Math teacher at school, today. Incidentally, despite her claiming to hate math all throughout home-schooling days, now that she's past Arithmetic, it's her favorite subject. [1] Yes, most of the time, that's a single-day activity. We had one for three months, once.

readthenotes1 3y ago

"Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors." That is, they cannot speak to how effective the teachers were as educators, only how disruptive they were as employees.

germinalphrase 3y ago
Assessing educator effectiveness is not a solved problem. For instance, the Gates Foundation made a full throated effort to research and develop a quantifiable measure and failed. In the end, they released a set of holistic, observable behaviors/practices that they believe are associated with teacher effectiveness. It’s a hard problem.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  I completely agree. For one thing, they're probably looking at the wrong things since student effectiveness will dominate teacher effectiveness, and that is where the hard problems come (knowing what to look at, what to measure, proxy measurement error, and measurement distinction)

hnthrowaway0328 3y ago

Licenses are more to protect the interest groups and deflect legal fights.

syntaxing 3y ago

The school district I went to had a policy that the teachers are required to have a related masters degree in the subject they’re teaching. It was a great school district since the teachers were all formerly non teachers at one point. My social studies teacher was a lawyer before, physics teacher actually published some papers as a physicists. The downside is the property tax ballooned out of control but I got a great education.

dchichkov 3y ago
A state or a small country can afford maybe a few schools like that. You need state sponsorship, endowment money or a district where property values ballooned out of control. And with a lot of money at stake, it's very likely that school administration compensation will be ballooning instead. Connecting schools with a university system could be a more viable option. Make it easy to teach in a nearby school, pay reasonably for tuition and a university can be a source of PhD students and postdocs that could get some easy pocket money as guest lecturers. I think, it's also refreshing for PhD students and postdocs to give classes to younger kids.
zdragnar 3y ago
Entire states are like this, and it doesn't work out that way at scale. Teachers get degrees to teach, and are buried under a mountain of debt while not being paid for it. On top of that, they need to take "continuing education" credits, which ostensibly is a way to stay on top of teaching trends but is really a racket for the teaching-adjacent industry. I don't think my state required the masters degree, but pay scales definitely were weighed in favor of it. It certainly didn't make for better teachers.
- peterfirefly 3y ago
  Entire countries do this. Seems to work fine for them.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Finland has generalist with special degrees doing Elementary school. After that the teachers have degree in subject or adjacent subject. Plus pedagogy. On other hand education is state paid so there isn't huge loans to pay off. It did not do badly in past. But less resources and more non-natives have taken a toll on results.

growingkittens 3y ago

The long-term impact is much more ambiguous to measure. I paid particular attention in school when a teacher would explain why they were trying to teach us something. I noticed the same patterns of teaching among different teachers in the same school system, and how it all worked together to reinforce the skills we needed. (Note: many of my peers experienced the "extra" work as pointless, because they didn't understand the long-term implications). Teachers who don't understand educational theory can't work as part of an educational system without additional training. In the meantime, their students miss out on long-term skill building. This situation makes me think of technical debt. A short-term fix with long-term, ambiguous problems that are difficult to unravel.

dan-robertson 3y ago
What’s a concrete example of one of the explanations for a reason you were given for your being taught something?
- growingkittens 3y ago
  Most of what I remember involves "transferability" - the ability to take a skill in one area and apply it in a different context. One way to teach this involves combining subjects, such as practicing reading and comprehension skills in math class with word problems. There is a keyword I am forgetting which would make this comment easier to answer in detail. If I remember it I will post again.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  Not who you replied to, but the bad one I always got was "You'll need to know it for college".
sesm 3y ago
Good point. In short, I would rephrase it as "if your measurement doesn't show the difference between trained and untrained teachers, maybe your measurement is wrong?" There 2 other plausible hypothesis that the article ignores: 1. What if untrained teachers are effective because they learn on the job from trained teachers? Which means that you have to have certain % of trained teachers to keep the system alive. 2. What if trained teachers become less effective because they drop their standards looking at how untrained ones work? This is a common phenomenon at workplaces, and I've seen it happen in software development many times.

GlibMonkeyDeath 3y ago

Here is the study for Massachusetts (saving you several layers of summary articles): https://wheelockpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Emergency-License-Y2-Report.pdf https://wheelockpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/... In every category, emergency/provisional licensed median values were lower than licensed teachers, including performance evaluations, although these results didn't reach 95% statistical significance of rejecting the null hypothesis. Even if they didn't reach P < 0.05, when all of the results point in one direction, I am not so sure I would completely agree with the top-level headline as it is stated.

dan-robertson 3y ago
The first plot in your link certainly looks inconclusive. It doesn’t look very close at all to meeting the statistical significance bar and I think it would be an error to conclude that it shows the emergency/provisionally licensed teachers were worse. But I wonder if other things might be going on, eg maybe COVID meant the emergency/provisionally licensed teachers were also disadvantaged from having less practice. And on the other hand, lots of them will have gotten much of the requirements for a license so it doesn’t really show much about the long term effects of changing the license requirements.

iaw 3y ago

I have a family member who was hired as an Emergency teacher over 20 years ago. They've since become fully credentialed, obtained their masters in education, taught masters students, and organized a particular program/subject at the district level. Speaking with them, their experience has been the core driver of a successful teacher is primarily whether they want to be there and care about the students success. Of course, when they were first hired they spent all of their free time crafting lessons plans for a subject they basically failed in high school. Studying the textbook and relevant material so they could teach it.

sgnelson 3y ago

Those few who are willing to go take a low salary to go deal with all the issues of the modern education system are just as good as those who are willing to go take a low salary and deal with all the issues of the modern education system, but have to jump through a few more hoops. I'm shocked. Let's face it, those who are willing to teach, and are probably leaving decent careers to do so, have a decent chance of being an okay teacher, because they probably have an idea of what they're getting into, and are willing to work hard. ie they WANT to be teachers. Of course, if we just paid teachers more, you'd probably have a higher number of qualified candidates, but that seems like that's too hard of a thing to do?

billdueber 3y ago

Reminder to everyone commenting here: you are not an average student. The hard part of teaching is not coming up with dynamite lessons for kids who are smart and want to learn and are capable of doing so and aren’t hungry. Anyone can do that. Well, almost anyone. Way back in the olden times, 5 to 10% of people went to school, and it worked really well for them. Now everyone goes to school, and it works really well for about 5% of us.

paulcole 3y ago
I promise you, this site is not as special as you think it is. The majority of people here are incredibly average (like me!), just fortunate to be born at the right time, be exposed to technology at the right time, get a few other lucky breaks, and of course put some work in. It’s super easy to convince yourself that because you’re successful you must be special. Remember that people tend to ascribe their successes to themselves and their failures to someone else.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  You would be average if you actually thought this site doesn't have a selection bias out of the world population. If you think HN averages out to a middle of the pack student, people who spend their free time reading text, you have quite the social bubble around you. There's also like 25 $1b+ founder/ceo's out of 50k.
  - paulcole 3y ago
    Believe it or not the world has a lot of people who are above average whose lives don’t revolve around computers. There’s just as many losers here as anywhere.
    - reducesuffering 3y ago
      First part, of course, but since HN is only like 50k that doesn’t say much about HN. Second part, there can forsure be many “losers” here but it’s quite ignorant to think there’s the same percentage struggling in math classes as the general population. Think about it. If you took 100 HN’ers where do you think they skew on succeeding on math tests or even taking classes like Calculus compared to gen pop? The average person even in the US doesn’t have a Bachelors degree. Do you think that applies to HN? Or that it’s not correlative with educational success?

more_corn 3y ago

Low bar

CharlesW 3y ago

Note that The 74 is an anti-union, pro-privatization, conservative advocacy (disguised as news) site funded by groups like The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation. https://truthout.org/articles/campbell-brown-the-new-leader-of-the-propaganda-arm-of-school-privatization/ https://truthout.org/articles/campbell-brown-the-new-leader-...

throw10920 3y ago
[flagged]
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Is the data they uncover dangerous?
- msrenee 3y ago
  I think the implication is that it may be misrepresented or cherry-picked in a way that strengthens their argument against public education. Not that every outlet isn't biased in some way, but this is a group with a known strong bias.
Someone 3y ago
I think that explains my observations. FTA: “New Jersey’s waiver policy was similar. Candidates could earn a temporary credential before passing the normal licensure exams or completing a teacher preparation program. The licenses were good for one year, at which point candidates would need to go back, pass the tests and complete their training” So, those people would have a job for a year, but in that time also would study to pass “the normal licensure exams”? I would think that strongly selects for people motivated to teach. Also, did they really have to _earn_ a temporary credential? The answer to that question seems to be “yes”. Google gives me https://www.nj.gov/education/covid19/teacherresources/instructionalCEtemp.shtml https://www.nj.gov/education/covid19/teacherresources/instru..., which says: “Candidates who have met all requirements for a CE or Certificate of Eligibility with Advanced Standing (CEAS) but have not yet passed the basic skills test and/or test of subject matter knowledge are eligible for the Temporary CE” Doesn’t that mean people who got that waiver are educated as teachers, but haven’t managed to pass all exams (most of them likely not because they can’t pass them but because there wasn’t any opportunity to do them)? I couldn’t find the regulation for Massachusetts, so I couldn’t check whether it had similar provisions (https://www.doe.mass.edu/licensure/emergency/ https://www.doe.mass.edu/licensure/emergency/ Probably comes close, but it mentions a program extension, and becomes confusing to me because of that) Also FTA: “Starting June 2020, Massachusetts began temporarily letting anyone with a bachelor’s degree teach” So, it’s not “without degrees”, but “without teaching degrees”, at least in Massachusetts (the article isn’t clear as to whether New Jersey had a similar restriction, but it had. See the link above)

mplewis 3y ago

There’s obviously no way this finding is true.