Time To Upgrade Educators’ Education

I don’t want to anger my teacher friends, offer up scapegoats to mollify the critics of public education or unfairly besmirch the reputations of the thousands of excellent teachers who serve America’s public schools.

In other words, I’m about to say something awful about teachers - well, prospective teachers, anyway. What triggers this muffled outburst is this: More than half the 2,000 applicants for teaching jobs in Massachusetts this spring flunked the state’s new reading and writing tests.

Educators are chagrined, acting Gov. Paul Cellucci is outraged, Education Commissioner Frank W. Haydu III has resigned (he says because Cellucci has turned the embarrassment into a political issue) and everybody is going my, my, my, over the fact that these prospective teachers couldn’t pass a literacy test that wouldn’t give a bright 10th-grader much trouble.

And I’m not the least bit surprised. The awkward secret is that too many young people who go into education are among the least academically gifted of their college classes. Indeed, it seems to be the case that many of them choose to become education majors precisely because it is among the easiest paths to a professional career.

This is a generalization, of course, and on that account unfair to the outstanding teachers, young and old, in my personal acquaintance. I know people who graduated this year and last with outstanding grades from academically tough institutions. They’ll be wonderful teachers.

But I also know teachers who would have trouble passing the math and reading comprehension tests they are required to give. Listen to this, from a Boston Globe piece reporting the test results:

“Some of the … student answers shown to reporters yesterday illustrated a strikingly poor grasp of English grammar. Some sentences were missing verbs; in others, common words were misspelled or incorrectly defined.”

Nor is there any reason to be cheered by the fact that the Massachusetts test screened out the worst performers. Until this spring, the state didn’t require a certification test at all, which suggests that a lot of people who would have failed this test are now teaching.

How can such poor performance be explained? A generation or two ago, the very brightest women went into teaching. But now that declining sex discrimination has opened up all sorts of better-paid fields to these women, teaching has become the refuge of the not-so-bright.

Further, there’s good reason to question what these would-be teachers are taught: Jargon, of course, and no end of education courses. As Thomas Sowell notes in his 1993 book, “Inside American Education,” education faculty are frequently viewed with some level of contempt by their arts-and-sciences colleagues. And the often worthless courses they teach frequently become requirements for certification as teachers. Sowell calls them “negative barriers, in the sense that they keep out the competent.”

It’s a lot easier to talk about the problem the Massachusetts embarrassment underscores than to figure out what to do about it. Higher pay might tempt some brighter students - male and female - into teaching. But - at least at the beginning - the higher pay would go to the very incumbents whose incompetency was the reason for the pay increase that, in addition, might prompt them to postpone retirement.

Tougher screening tests - even if you could get the teachers unions to agree to tough new tests - might not necessarily give you the teachers you want. Many gifted teachers have trouble with tests; many who perform well on written tests have trouble passing along what they know.

Clearly, you wouldn’t want to hire an English teacher who couldn’t pass a simple literacy test or a math teacher who has difficulty with simultaneous equations. But suppose your test screens out a terrific math teacher who has difficulty with spelling or subject-verb agreement?

You don’t have to see the Massachusetts test to suspect that a good deal of what it tests is not particularly relevant to classroom success - or to doubt that those who pass it the second time around are, on that account, more competent than before. (Those who failed will be allowed to take it again this month.)

Still, the wholesale failure of young college graduates trained as teachers is cause for alarm. And it may help to explain why some of our schools are in such bad shape.