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     |
    +--------------+------------------------+

    +----------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
    | 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         |
    +----------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+

----------

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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?

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.

I'm mostly going on the stories from a teacher relative; I'm 99% speculating.

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.

That is, they cannot speak to how effective the teachers were as educators, only how disruptive they were as employees.

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.

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.

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.

https://truthout.org/articles/campbell-brown-the-new-leader-...