Can’t meet all of the requirements for your teaching license?
No problem, says the Department of Education. Go to the Leadership Academy, and become a principal.
Don’t take our word for it. Read Sam Freedman’s education column in today’s New York Times, Inexperienced but Trained. It tells the story of the new principal of P.S. 7 in the Bronx, trained by the Leadership Academy. After four years as a teacher, with the time window allowed for obtaining the Masters Degree required for permanent licensure about to close, the new principal entered the Leadership Academy. She will now be a principal, with a new clock for the Masters Degree, without ever having completed that requirement for a teacher’s license.
Perhaps when this clock runs out, she can move on to a superintendent’s position. With a little bit of luck and good timing, Tweed can ensure she can retire with a healthy pension — and complete her Masters Degree in retirement.
Update by Kombiz: THIS JUST IN: The DOE faxed over a letter from Baruch College saying that new principal Renee Cloutier does, in fact, have a Master’s Degree, effective May 31, 2006. We’re glad they cleared that up … and we’re glad Sam Freedman of the New York Times continues to focus on the importance of having qualified administrators, as well as qualified teachers.
52 Comments:
1 curious3
· Aug 17, 2006 at 9:57 am
Hey Leo,
Is there any evidence that the Masters Degree required for permanent licensure is correlated with better teacher performance? I have spoken with many experienced teachers and read many academic papers that claim that the current licensure requirements are entirely uncorrelated with teacher effectiveness. What are your views on the value of the Masters Degree?
Ken
2 Peter Goodman
· Aug 17, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Ken
I refer you to the work of Ferguson at Harvard who has favorably correlated teacher grades on pre-service exams and pupil achievement … and would you seek medical attention from someone w/o a medical degree? but after most of the kids are poor kids of color …
3 paulrubin
· Aug 17, 2006 at 3:18 pm
This is all related to the same attitude that anyone can serve any function in a school regardless of background, personality, educational experience, etc. A principal has the same requirements for success as middle management in a Target or WalMart. Think about the end result of such a situation. You’re a teacher in a NYC public school who legitimately wants to service the children better. But who do you seek for help these days? The supervisors often have less experience in the classroom (and sometimes are even bad at it) so they’re of no help. The powers that be have openly pushed veteran teachers into retirement. And the coaches/mentors/what have you, often have less experience as well and sometimes what knowledge they do possess isn’t really about classroom management in hard to staff schools.
The system is broken and it’s not just schools, and there’s been fallout throughout the economy. It’s just more amusing when you see this in a school setting.
Bottom line. Everyone thinks that they 13+ years as a student makes them qualified to teach, or worse yet, supervise teachers. If only that made any sense
4 xkaydet65
· Aug 17, 2006 at 4:23 pm
This is not a new phenomenon. Medical personnel have been dealing with it for quite some time. Hospital admins are rarely MDs. Medical Groups have to deal with directives from their insurance company.
Years ago utilities like Con Ed, Bkl’n, and NY Tel. promoted from the field. My cousin went from putting and pulling meters in Bed Stuy to the computer ops center on 14 St with Con Ed. My brother in law ran Verizon’s NYC maint and repair unit. Neither had a college degree. But 15 years ago or so these outfits sought out business school grads to manage the units. One of the articles of this new faith is that management is about people skills, or rather motivation. It is not about the nuts and bolts of the job. Results are judged by the bottom line and profitability, even in Medicine. Is it any wonder that a business guy like Bloomie and a glorified office manager like Klein was at Justice should see a principal’s job in the same way?
On a personal note,80 years ago my grandfather was a Tammany politician. Boss Charles Murphy offered to send him to college and would groom him for mayor. As he had a wife, a 7 year old daughter and a one year old son he declined. Murphy told Jimmy Walker to appoint my grandfather as Hospital’s Commissioner. He never graduated High school. He served in the job till the downfall of Walker’s admin. During that time every ambulance had an MD aboard and Bellvue was the showcase for public medical care in the world. My Grandfather’s doing? No. He asked the professionals who to hire and followed their advice, always remembering to save Tammany a taste.
5 curious3
· Aug 18, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Hey Peter,
I am all for giving teachers competency tests and it doesn’t suprise me that those that perform better on pre-service exams outperform as teachers, however that wasn’t my question. The question is about the evidence that a Masters Degree is correlated with better teaching performance. Is there any evidence of that?
Ken
6 jd2718
· Aug 18, 2006 at 9:20 pm
Ken,
your question is more than a bit unfair:
We can posit that more education leads to becoming a better teacher. But it is not provable. We can’t even supply evidence that having a high school diploma correlates with better teaching performance.
Further, I would argue that better teaching performance is very hard to define, and impossible to measure.
Now, if we are not trolling for evidnce, we can ask several reasonable, real questions. We want our teachers to have a lot of education. How much are we looking for? How much should be general knowledge, how much should be content area knowledge, how much should be pedagogy (methods, etc).
Jonathan
7 paulrubin
· Aug 18, 2006 at 9:27 pm
The NYC school system always takes people into the system so long as they have a 98.6 body temp and you want to eliminate on of the few significant qualifications, a masters degree? Why not just take high school grads? Is there any formal evidence that a Bachelor’s Degree is correlated with better teaching performance? Hell why stop there. Why not just just move middle school graduates right into the classroom
The problem with schools is all about class size for the bottom and top students percentile-wise and getting and retaining hard working, intelligent, creative teachers and supervisors.
Do you realize, Curious, how absurd you sound? Everyone wants to raise standards for the students and you’re talking about eliminating standards for the teachers that are supposed to bring them there. I don’t suppose this opinion has anything to do with coming up with yet another excuse to make teaching an even worse paid profession than it already is?
Do you not understand that we live in a different era than our grandparents with respect to public education? Back then, women had only two options for careers, nursing and teaching. Now that women have 100 other places to direct their career efforts, we need to make it more desirable to become a teacher AND raise the standards for entry into the profession because it’s harder, not easier.
We should probably be talking about encouraging our teachers to get their phD’s, not forget their Masters.
8 Persam1197
· Aug 19, 2006 at 11:30 am
I agree; we should be encouraging teachers to get their PhD’s. Education and experience are definite prerequisites to excellent teaching. Our pay scale reflects both. The question I have is why is there not a differential for teachers who go beyond the Masters + 30? There are other factors beyond the above that contributes to good instruction, but you can’t beat a well-prepared and experienced teacher.
The same goes with administrators. I’m sorry; you can’t supervise what you don’t know. Administrators who take the express route to becoming supervisors have a serious deficit to overcome. It’s not impossible, but one would have to admit that he/she needs people knowledgeable about content and pedagogy to guide him/her.
The fact that experienced teachers and experienced administrators (who know how to teach) are so rare these days is an indication of poor retention in this system. The principal’s leadership academy and the NYC Teaching Fellows programs are trying to fast-track personnel into positions to stop the hemmoraging.
9 NYC Educator
· Aug 19, 2006 at 3:31 pm
Perhaps it’s time to re-examine the thirty-year NYC shortcut program.
10 curious3
· Aug 19, 2006 at 7:08 pm
Jonathan, Paul, and Persam simply assert that advanced degrees are important or helpful. However, all the articles I have read and people I have spoken to who study the issue suggest otherwise. One example is the chapter on the subject in Education Myths by Jay Greene called “The Certification Myth”. Check it out. Are you all basing your opinions on any data at all? How do you explain the success of Teach For America? Leo, what is your opinion? Do you know of data or studies that suggest that advanced degrees are important?
Ken
11 Civil Servant
· Aug 20, 2006 at 8:42 am
I do not believe there is any relevance between advnced degrees or additional credits earned. Classroom involvement and competent supervision make do. These positions require Leadership traits, which may have little to do with formal education.
I always thought that the Masters degree requirement and the opportunity to gather 30 post graduate credits was solely for the purpose of earning more, for which we are very fortunate. I do not believe that any other union in NYC offers additional salary for poist graduate credits.
Do I wish we were off till Tuesday. I hate losing Labor Day weekend !!!
12 paulrubin
· Aug 20, 2006 at 8:57 am
I didn’t say anything about certification. I have no opinion on the insanity that is the licensing process across the U.S. I’m simply pointing out the obvious. If you wish to call into question the importance of a Master’s Degree, why stop there. Why need a Bachelor’s Degree. Why need a High School Diploma? Why do full professors need a doctorate? Why have any educational expectations whatsoever. Why not just give a test. I helped my wife pass the Praxis exam for the NJ equivalent of Common Branches. I personally could have aced this test back in 5th grade. It was almost more of a test to see what meaningless drivel you retained from years ago than what you actually should know now.
But the bottom line is, there’s nothing wrong with expecting our teachers should have more education, not less. One of the biggest problems I’m seeing in the middle schools is that today’s teachers know less, not more, and this isn’t a good thing.
The Teach for America program is fine but there’s a stringent process to get into it whereas typically those who follow the standard program for becoming a teacher are among the lowest performers academically so you’re comparing apples and oranges. The system makes it undesirable for people to commit to teaching careers. You’re also failing to take into account all the hundreds of extra hours of training Teach for America personnel go through. In some respects, more effort than a traditional master’s program.
13 curious3
· Aug 20, 2006 at 10:09 am
Paul,
There IS something wrong with requiring our teachers to have more education than they need — it reduces the number of candidates that are willing to become teachers. The TFA approach seems to work better — find great candidates based on whatever seems to work, not meaningless advanced degrees — and then have a short (six-weeks I think?) but intense training program followed up by frequent guidance and mentoring. This seems to work much better than hiring those that are amongst the lowest performers academically in college and encouraging advanced degrees of questionable utility.
As far as extending my argument to college and high-school degrees, I don’t think there is data on that but I would guess the results would be poor. I think you are using a “slippery slope” argument inappropriately. In most real-world problems, there is an optimal answer that isn’t at either extreme. My argument is that the data suggests that requiring advanced degrees is not optimal for K through 12 education. The common-sense argument for this is that you shouldn’t need an advanced math degree, for example, to teach kids pre-college math or, for that matter, a masters in education to teach in general.
Ken
14 NYC Educator
· Aug 20, 2006 at 11:49 am
Interestingly enough, NYC has flirted for thirty years with hiring teachers who couldn’t pass basic competency tests. The results have been less than stellar, by most accounts.
A lot of less-than-practical things are taught in ed. school. I’d say, though, that it the impractical isn’t limited to education.
I suggest, Ken, that you experiment with doctors who haven’t graduated medical school, and lawyers who haven’t passed the bar. That will display your conviction.
Lead by example.
15 paulrubin
· Aug 20, 2006 at 4:12 pm
I can’t realy comment on programs I’m not familiar with. I’ll stick with my own experiences. I have two degrees in secondary school mathematics education yet have never had reason to teach above Regents Algebra and Geometry in a classroom setting. So the question is, do I view the fact that ALL of my around 40 credits of mathematics is in subject matter above what I’ve had to teach is a waste? The answer is an emphatic no. My experience with calculus, ordinary and partial diferential equations, advanced statistics, linear algebra and the like are invaluable. I have gotten to see the big picture and as a direct result, I have alternative techniques at my disposal. I know what really is and isn’t important. I know when the textbooks aren’t doing the job. I can see and deal with errors in standardized testing. I can form intelligent opinions about career choices when students and their parents approach me. I can steer students towards a better long term way of dealing with certain kinds of problems. I can deal with math team competitions and other competitive endeavors. The list is endless. But the bottom line is my mind has been trained as both a mathematician AND a teacher AND I have the experience to put it all into perspective.
My guess is that advanced degrees are more important for the subject area teaching of middle and high school but I personally don’t see why we’d want our teachers to be less formally educated rather than more.
And furthermore, saying I’m mis-using the “slippery slope” argument is just plain incorrect. Until there is concrete evidence that a Bachelor’s Degree ensures just as good a teacher as an Associates Degree vs. a doctorate vs. a high school diploma, this is one place where experimentation can do irreparable damage because you’re NOT looking at the big picture. If you make it easier and easier to become a teacher, you will increase the number of less educated candidates, further reducing the need to pay teachers appropriately which will chase away the more educated candidates.
I’m sorry but I’m a parent too. I want the smartest hardworking people dealing with my children. I’d go so far and to push for more education, more in-service training, more required in-service training, a mentoring system, etc. American teachers should be expected to be smarter and better students, not worse. When I hire a doctor, I’m looking for experience and training. Ditto for a lawyer. You’re looking for a cheap fix. I’m not. Most undergraduate education in the U.S. is little more than slightly more advanced than high school. That’s not good enough. I want my children’s teachers to have jumped through those academic hoops so I can be even slightly more confident that they’re providing the service to my children I’m willing to pay for.
If you have a problem with the quality of teachers in NYC, do things to make more good candidates apply, don’t take actions that are designed to simply throw more borderline candidates into the system. And that’s not a knock on Teach for America or even the DOE’s Leadership Academy. I’m ok with alternative ways of staffing our classrooms as long as the requirements for getting into those programs are kept high (I’m not convinced of that for both programs at all) and we closely monitor the results over the long haul, not for 1-2-3 years. I’d also absolutely go back to the drawing boards with most of the undergraduate and graduate education programs around the U.S. There are failings that need to be addressed. I don’t just want our teachers having a Master’s. I want them to have truly earned something tough to achieve and valuable to possess. That’s where the argument should be. Not at throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
16 jd2718
· Aug 20, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Ken,
you say:
but you don’t offer how much you think IS needed. Is a high school diploma necessary? An associate degree? A bachelors degree in some content area? (math, history). A degree in teaching? A masters? A PhD?
If someone says that too much education is required, they should have a suggestion for how much should be required.
Do you have any ideas, suggestions? Or are you just being a jerk and trying to rile people up?
17 paulrubin
· Aug 20, 2006 at 8:27 pm
Who are we kidding here? There’s only one agenda for decreasing the amount of education or lessening the certification process, etc. That’s to make it easier to fill the system with warm bodies and cut costs. It’s not about what’s best for kids. It’s not about what’s best for teachers. It’s not about what parents want. It’s just another excuse to say that teachers aren’t true professionals who should be given more autonomy and more flexibility to do their jobs.
18 Chaz
· Aug 20, 2006 at 9:16 pm
Jonathan:
I believe that is exactly what Ken is doing.
Further, nyc educator is correct when he said that for the past 30 years New York City will hire any warm body to teach rather than make the job more attractive. The result is that quality teachers in all classrooms are a pipe dream.
19 curious3
· Aug 21, 2006 at 10:22 am
Here are my suggestions:
1. Teachers should be required to have a bachelors degree (with no subject-specific concentration requirement) and to pass competency exams in the subjects that they will be teaching.
2. Teachers should not be required to have advanced degrees or any particular ed-school degree.
3. I would strongly weight the past academic performance and subject-matter knowledge of the candidates for teaching roles. I would greatly prefer a math teacher that was an English major from a good school with good grades that performs well on math competency tests than a math major from a poor school with poor grades and poor test performance. To be clear, though, these hiring decisions should be mostly judgment-based and not rules-based except for things like point #1.
4. I think principals should be accountable for overall school performance and have the authority to hire teachers that they believe will achieve the best results.
The goal is to have smart, capable, and competent teachers.
Finally, I encourage everyone to minimize the use of ad hominem attacks. They just create noise and move us away from reaching agreement on positive steps.
Ken
20 curious3
· Aug 21, 2006 at 10:27 am
By the way, the chapter I referred to in “Education Myths” by Jay Greene (“The Certification Myth”) discusses in detail the data relevant to advanced degrees and student performance, not just the data relevant to certification. I highly recommend this chapter for those interested in the subject.
Ken
21 Civil Servant
· Aug 21, 2006 at 10:29 am
As a child growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s I found the schools fabulous and I was not aware if teachers had advanced degrees or not. Perhaps the available talent pool was different. Perhaps the City was different.
I do remember that the original intent and requirements for advanced degrees and credits resulted only in a salary increase, and I do not know if there is a fundamental inconsistency between having additional requirements for earnings or having additional requirements to develop abilities that are transmitted to the children.
Certainly, my peers who took correspondence classes to earn credit in the 70’s did not fully develop any additional skills.
The correct solution may be the establishment of a rigid academic requirement with the commensurate salary, rather than subrogating educational achievement to salary negotiations.
22 paulrubin
· Aug 21, 2006 at 2:34 pm
My wife has a bachelor’s degree. I’m pretty confident that she could past a competency exam in middle school mathematics or below (not sure she could pass a high school math exam anymore but quite possibly she would have passed one closer to her high school years. Under your system, she could teach math to kids in say 8th grade. Got it.
I’d have to pull my kids from such a system. I’ve already seen first hand what damage can be done to a child who ends up with a non-math teacher teaching mathematics. Hell, that’s part of what’s wrong with our system now with elementary school teachers are stink at math trying to teach it. Your plan extends the error to the upper grades. Brilliant strategy.
What I said stands. Advocates of such a system are looking to make teaching a non-profession with lower salaries in an effort to further damage the system and force more middle class parents to consider private school. No thanks. I want my child’s 6th grade math teacher to know way more about math than how to find the area of a rectangle or do long division. I want them to have been exposed to all sorts of teaching techniques both subject and non-subject specific. I want them to know how to use technology in the classroom. I want them to be familiar with the educational research and to have some idea how to conduct research on their own. I want my children’s teachers to have as much raw knowledge as possible and I’m willing to pay a little more to make sure that’s what I’m getting. Bachelor’s degree today is no more valuable than a high school diploma of 30-40 years ago and I and my parents weren’t taught by simply high school graduates.
Again, there are bad teachers with advanced degrees. There are good teachers with bachelor’s degrees. But we should be encouraging all of them to get as much formal and informal training as humanly possible and that means paying them.
23 curious3
· Aug 21, 2006 at 5:40 pm
Hey Paul,
I think the current licensure requirements are out of balance. That doesn’t mean I want people that can’t pass high school math exams teaching 8th-graders. On the other hand, I don’t think someone would need a masters degree in math to teach arithmetic, for example. Let’s find the right balance. “As much training as humanly possible” doesn’t strike me as the right balance.
On a different matter, I wish you would open your mind to the possibility that people that want to reduce licensure requirements don’t all have some hidden agenda. The goal is to get better teachers in the classroom. This would be a great thing for public schools and a great thing for the teaching profession.
Ken
24 jd2718
· Aug 21, 2006 at 6:54 pm
Civil Servant,
you wonder:
I have two questions:
1) what should that requirement be?
2) after 30 years of the profession being treated badly, do you think we could find enough people to meet this requirement?
I don’t think it is such a terrible idea, but I know that when ’standards’ are set too high, ‘exceptions’ get very large.
And, I do think that there is a certain amount of content knowledge that is not vital to being able to teach, but would improve teaching. I could see some value to financial incentives to learn more, though I note your concern and do not reject it out of hand.
Jonathan
25 jd2718
· Aug 21, 2006 at 7:42 pm
Paul,
I had a strange conversation a week ago with a TFA Fellow who left after several years. She had indeed been graduated from a good school, had not studied math, but became a middle school math teacher.
Something didn’t click as we were talking, because I started thinking that she had good math skills (maybe it was the good college clouding my judgment?).
So someone else is asking questions, and we agree, in response to one, that just knowing a lot of math doesn’t mean that you can teach. And I add that an engineer who can’t teach is a problem that resolves itself, because everyone can tell and the guy won’t last, but someone who can run a class but doesn’t know math can go on doing damage for years and years.
Maybe it struck too close to home. I felt daggers the rest of the evening.
26 NYC Educator
· Aug 21, 2006 at 9:47 pm
I’m very disappointed, Ken, that you’ve yet to indicate whether you’d use doctors and lawyers who haven’t attended medical or law school. In fact, after posing so many questions, you’ve failed to even give me the courtesy of a response.
Frankly, I’m disappointed, particularly since I’ve not resorted to those ad hominem arguments which you find so distasteful. I’d venture to say, in fact, that my arguments very closely mirror yours.
For example, you can’t deny we’d increase the pool of doctors and lawyers if we stopped making them take advanced degrees.
And I haven’t seen any studies establishing that advanced degrees made them any better doctors and lawyers. Do you know of any?
Personally, I wouldn’t experiment with underqualified doctors, lawyers, or teachers, nor would I allow them to deal with my children. But I think people who monitor our health, defend our rights, and teach our children are critical.
That’s just me, of course. How about you, Ken?
27 curious3
· Aug 21, 2006 at 10:40 pm
Hey NYC Educator,
Let me answer your questions:
1. In our country, as far as I know, you need a license to be a practicing doctor or lawyer. Therefore, there isn’t much or any data. In teaching, there is data to compare how teachers with different educations and licenses perform. Therefore, one can often make the comparison.
2. Both doctors and lawyers are required to pass very demanding exams to practice their field. I would be OK with this being applied to teaching.
3. I would be fine with using a lawyer that only passed the bar exam, but that is not an option I am given. Many lawyers think that law school is too long and that most of what you learn is a waste in practice (especially considering how much of law in practice is state law and not what you learn in law school). I have not studied the issue deeply, but I am guessing that our law licensing requirements are excessive.
4. As far as doctors, I would be happy to visit a doctor or nurse that didn’t go to four years of medical school for many situations. Many medical experts think that our medical cost problem is in part caused by the monopoly of treatment for even the most minor health issues granted to people with years of medical education. For more complex issues, I would certainly want someone with a lot of training and education.
5. In any case, although it might hurt some feelings, the amount of specialized school-taught knowledge that is required to be a doctor or lawyer is much greater than required to be a teacher. That doesn’t mean it isn’t extremely difficult to be a great teacher! That only means that years of specialized education is not the most useful thing in creating great teachers. This might explain, for example, why TFA teachers seem on average to perform as well or better than teachers with much more formal training.
Finally, NYC Educator, I wish you were less sarcastic. I think your arguments would make a stronger positive impression.
Ken
28 paulrubin
· Aug 21, 2006 at 10:45 pm
Did I ever say that knowledge of advanced mathematics ensures that someone can teach arithmetic? I don’t remember saying that. There’s no guarantees until you put the person in front of a classroom and give the person a year or two. But if you think it’s ok for a person who can pass a high school math test to teach 8th graders, that shows how little you know about teaching math. Can it be done? Sure. I’ve even assisted people with other licenses do precisely that because there aren’t enough licensed math people to go around. More often than not, it’s not a pretty sight and I wouldn’t subject my own children to that if I had a choice. And some of these people are actually good teachers too. They know how to handle a classroom. They have child-friendly personalities. Blah blah blah. But these kids are going to be far more prone to failure when the work gets more challenging and will almost certainly not pursue careers that require advanced mathematics and perhaps worst of all, we’ll continue the pattern of turning kids off math so another generation doesn’t go into mathematics education.
Did it ever occur to you that underlying it all is the knowledge that someone who pursues an advanced degree in a specific subject area is clearly and concretely demonstrating that they really like that subject and get the opportunity to explore it in depth, and then pass along that enthusiasm to their much younger students. No I suppose you can’t see that.
So in the end we have multiple arguments against your idea. And only one reason to support it, the increase of the available pool of teachers even if that pool is academically inferior when the academic quality of teachers in general is regarded as too low to begin with.
BTW, you do realize that teachers in NY don’t need a Master’s Degree to get a job as a teacher. You get at least 5 years to obtain said degree which means we’re already experimenting with this idea. I’d venture that the vast majority of NY teachers with less than 4-5 years in the system don’t have a master’s degree. That hasn’t really resolved the problem.
29 jd2718
· Aug 22, 2006 at 12:28 am
“This might explain, for example, why TFA teachers seem on average to perform as well or better than teachers with much more formal training.”
You demand evidence of others, yet you feel free to make things up?
30 curious3
· Aug 22, 2006 at 7:08 am
Hey Jonathan,
There is an in-depth study on relative performance of TFA teachers that was completed by Mathematica in 2004. Here is a link:
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/education/teach4amer.asp
One conclusion from the report: “Even though Teach For America teachers generally lack any formal teacher training beyond that provided by Teach For America, they produce higher test scores than the other teachers in their schools – not just other novice teachers or uncertified teachers, but also veterans and certified teachers.”
I have also spoken to many principals and teachers in the NYC system that speak very highly of TFA teachers in general. I have never spoken to a principal or teacher that speaks poorly of them in general. Of course, this is just anecdotal.
Ken
31 curious3
· Aug 22, 2006 at 7:23 am
Hey Paul,
I agree that it is great that teachers don’t have to have a Master’s Degree to start a teaching job in NY. The fact that the system allows people to teach for 5 years without the degree backs up the theory that many people believe the degree is not really that important. The next step is to remove the requirement completely. Teachers have a hard enough job without wasting their time on getting a Master’s Degree that study after study suggests doesn’t help them in the classroom. You might recall that my original question asked why Leo thinks the Master’s Degree is so important. (Recall that Leo incorrectly but suggestively pointed out the lack of the degree for a new principal.)
Separately, I think it is out of balance to require teachers to get degrees to demonstrate that “they really like that subject”.
As far as the tests themselves, I am guessing that the competency exams I am referring to are more difficult and the required scores higher than the ones you might be thinking about.
Finally, the best check on all of this will be to hold principals accountable for overall school performance and allowing them to hire the teachers that they think will do the best job. They might agree more with you than me on requirements for math teachers and I would be fine with that if it leads to good results. I have spoken to several successful principals, though, that share my point of view.
Ken
32 NYC Educator
· Aug 22, 2006 at 8:09 am
Ken,
Frankly, I’m disappointed you regard my comments as sarcastic. Having read your questions for several months now, I thought my tone matched yours precisely. Perhaps you should compose and post a set of rules for those who wish to address you.
Meanwhile, you’ll be happy to learn that New York City has experimented with your idea of using uncertified teachers for thirty years. As I reported at least twice on this very page, the results are in.
Turns out, though, they’re less than encouraging, despite Chancellor Klein’s valiant trip to Albany to hire and retain thousands of teachers unable to pass even a basic competency test.
That would be the LAST test, which Mayor Bloomberg took, passed, and declared any high school grad ought to be able to pass. Oddly, that was before he sent Chancellor Klein on the above-mentioned mission.
They did indeed manage to increase the field of available teachers, a goal you specifically endorsed.
And New York City, before its thirty-year flirtation with ideas that mirrored yours, did indeed have demanding tests for teachers with a Board of Examiners. Before it began embracing ideas like yours, it was one of the best systems in the state, in the world, in fact.
It’s certainly true there are nurse-practitioners performing routine medical exams and such. Unfortunately, they too must meet standards. And you can’t deny we’d increase the pool of nurses if we stopped making them attend grad school.
You’ve also failed to address my question–Where is there evidence supporting your contention that advanced degrees make better doctors, or lawyers, or nurses?
Where’s a study supporting your contention that an individual who passed the bar is just as good as one who went to law school? Kindly use the same standard you apply to others.
The UFT has long supported higher standards for teachers. It’s gratifying to know we have your support, at long last.
Personally, I wouldn’t experiment with underqualified teachers, nor would I allow them to deal with my children.
Nor would I advocate using them for New York City’s 1.1 million kids, who’ve suffered enough from such experiments.
33 Persam1197
· Aug 22, 2006 at 8:38 am
I would need a lot more than a chapter in “The Certification Myth” to convince me that advanced degrees are meaningless. A teacher with an advanced degree beyond basic requirements demonstrates not only content knowledge, but a passion for the discipline he/she is engaged in. I want to see that passion in my colleagues. I’m a parent and I expect to see that fire in my child’s teachers. Most importantly, I myself must have that fire to make literature and composition come alive to my students.
Am I a better teacher with or without my advanced degree in English? If my answer is the latter, it’s time to change careers.
My sensei explained to our Aikido class how education compares across disciplines. He said that we are, as professionals, black belts in our respective fields and we are trying to help raise our students through the lower belts to become black belts themselves. But before you can train a student to eventually become a shodan (first degree) black belt, you must yourself be a black belt and CONTINUE to learn. Therefore, a disciple (of a discipline) not only trains, but continues to be trained!
Finally, we can tell the quality of a society by the way it treats its children. The fact that NYC Educator, Paul, Jonathan, etc. have to even explain why quality matters is a sad discourse indeed.
34 curious3
· Aug 22, 2006 at 10:35 am
I agree strongly that quality matters. I think we disagree on the best approach to getting the highest-quality teachers in our schools. I look forward to further debates on this subject! Thanks for spending the time to discuss this with me.
Ken
35 curious3
· Aug 22, 2006 at 10:43 am
p.s. NYC Educator, I don’t think the data on lawyers and doctors exists because of the licensing requirements in our country, but I am not sure why that should preclude us from analyzing the data we do have on the teaching profession.
Ken
36 Persam1197
· Aug 22, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Ken,
The problem is that there is very little data on the teaching profession other than standardized exams and even that is hardly conclusive (e.g. charter schools, vouchers, et-al). Children are not quantitative like widgets. There are too many variables in interpreting data. Common sense should dictate that preparation is a positive, not a negative.
37 Math_Teacher
· Aug 22, 2006 at 7:52 pm
[I'm coming to this discussion late. I must first get one thing off my chest: I am disappointed at the ad hominem attacks and rudeness that I've seen (including from people whose whose comments I previously respected). It's neither appropriate nor productive. Attacking people for disagreeing with you is a bad way to learn anything. Now, on to the better stuff.]
A few basic points:
1. I think everyone who completes the Leadership Academy (two summers intensives and a year of residency in between) gets a masters’ degree from Baruch. Also, I believe that to have an administrative certification, you must have /a/ master’s degree; if you already have one, you can take slightly fewer courses and get just a certificate. (Sorry for any errors; I’ve not had occasion to get totally clear on this.)
2. “Common sense” may help assess the direction of the impact of an intervention, but it’s notoriously poor at figuring out the size, which is essential to balance costs with benefits. If I ask for data and someone gives me “common sense”, I remain skeptical (and I feel I am right to be so). (The history of physics is a long story of people questioning “common sense” and using data to bring us closer to the truths of the universe.)
3. The licensure regimes that exist for medicine and law are the worst aspects of those training systems. The numbers of MDs and JDs who graduate each year is kept lower than the what the market demands by the AMA and ABA simply because lower supply means higher prices. There are a lot more people out there who could be good (or at least adequate) doctors and lawyers than are allowed to go to school, and there’s a very real cartel that prevents those who go to approved schools from pursuing licensure through alternate routes (or even by meeting all of the same standards). (By the way, millions of people do visit healthcare providers who aren’t certified physicians.)
Now, on to my real point: We don’t know that a master’s degree in education makes anyone a better teacher. I believe that some programs make some people better teachers. But it’s a totally unsupported leap to say this is generally true. This is not a new opinion; the weakness of ed schools in preparing new teachers has been widely published, and I can’t say my own experience belies it at all. Many of my master’s courses were wasted time. They did not make me a better teacher in the long run, and in the short run, they stole time that I would have otherwise used to prepare my classes better. Similarly, from what I’ve heard from literally scores of lawyer friends, the third year of law school doesn’t really help anyone become a better lawyer — but the ABA requires it anyway.
Certainly, neither content knowledge nor “intelligence” are sufficient to teach well. But there’s a pretty strong correlation between “intelligence” (however you measure it) and being able to learn and solve problems. Study after study basically says that, other things equal, the smarter you are, the better you will be at teaching. I don’t see why this is surprising, given that it seems to be true in many other professional fields. If requirements to attend unhelpful training are keeping smart people out of teaching, that’s a real cost that we should address.
(By the way, Freedman doesn’t point the finger at the lack of training, but at the lack of experience, and I think he’s right.)
Finally, in reading Liping Ma’s study of elementary math teaching in China and the US, I was shocked to read that Chinese teachers typically leave school after ninth grade and then attend three years of teacher training (normal school). But they teach math way better than US elementary teachers do.
It’s not the hours in seats or the number of credits, but the quality of training and thinking that matters. If we care about how our kids learn, we shouldn’t defend straw men like the ed schools of today. We should demand quality training for teachers and not require them to gorge themselves on the pap that’s currently on offer.
38 paulrubin
· Aug 22, 2006 at 8:01 pm
TFA personnel are not your average teaching candidate. That they might perform better than some of their peers is not a surprise. But the argument you’re making is that they’d gain nothing by participating in even more training in their subject area and in the field of education in general. It’s a sad commentary that teachers have to defend the idea that teachers should have higher standards to achieve rather than lower.
39 NYC Educator
· Aug 22, 2006 at 10:04 pm
Ken,
Frankly, I see little evidence you think quality matters. In fact, I see little evidence you’ve even bothered to read what I wrote, so I’m puzzled by your notion of “further debates.”
I’m sorely disappointed you are patently unable to support your ideas with the evidence you regularly demand of others. Your decision to ignore evidence which plainly contradicts your preposterous suppositions is also rather disappointing.
One of the troubling things about standards is that so many people feel they apply only to certain selected individuals.
Persam,
I very much appreciate your comment about how pathetic it is that we’re even discussing such a thing.
It’s remarkable what passes for ideas in this country nowadays, and it’s plainly disgraceful that people who call themselves conservatives can spend so much time and effort blithely attacking public education.
Sometimes I think I’m more conservative than many conservatives. And I’m not remotely conservative.
40 Math_Teacher
· Aug 23, 2006 at 12:39 am
I won’t blame Ken if he decides to stop arguing with people who have drunk the Kool-Aid (and not the good kind).
Whoever said “they [TFAers]’d gain nothing by participating in even more training in their subject area and in the field of education in general”? That straw man needs to have some stalks pushed back in before they poke one of us in the eye.
In my opinion, the burden should not be on the critics of teacher ed simply because the status quo happens to be that a master’s degree is required; rather, it should be on all of us clear-thinking educators to justify this additional training by showing that its benefits exceed its costs: tuition, the value of one’s time, mind-numbing classes with “professors” who are neither as informed nor as intelligent as their students, and the secondary effects that these barriers to entry have on keeping talented people out of the field.
This last is particularly important and seems to be ignored by those tossing vitriol above. TFA corps members (and, more to the point because TFAers don’t hang around for long, those in other alt-cert programs targeted at hiring more permanent teachers) wouldn’t be teaching at all if you made them get a master’s degree first.
Finally, to say “Children are not quantitative like widgets” as an argument against looking at data is flatly insulting to my intelligence. Sure, “there are [lots of] variables in interpreting data” — but this needn’t mean that there are “too many” to draw conclusions, only that it’s challenging, tricky work. That makes it even more worth doing.
41 jd2718
· Aug 23, 2006 at 8:06 am
Ken,
your study is interesting. However it is elementary grades only, it finds a small advantage in math, none in reading, and does not compare TFA to experienced teachers, but to all (including certified, non-certified, novice, experienced, etc).
42 paulrubin
· Aug 23, 2006 at 12:15 pm
That is the problem precisely. I’ve seen generally good things from the TFA teachers, at least some of them. But again, my own children would be best served by the best of the experienced teachers, all of whom have master’s degrees. Comparing TFA teachers to other uncertified and novice teachers is probably not a bad idea but those people don’t generally have a Masters degree in anything or anything relevant either so it’s misusing statistics to prove a point.
Now I suppose if NYC truly instituted an ongoing training system for its staff that was really meaningful, that might reduce the need and value of a more traditional Masters degree in an education field but to date, the system hasn’t come close to producing such an alternative means of furthering a teacher’s knowledge and skill set.
We could of cause tweak the current system from 5 years to perhaps 7. I might favor that, not because I don’t believe in the value of a Masters in a specific subject area especially in grades 6 and above but rather to give the fledgling teacher 2 or 3 years in the trenches to see if this is truly how they want to spend their lives. It’s tough for a full time teacher to take more than 2-3 classes per year so 3+ years to complete the Masters is to be expected. Giving them 2-3 years to be sure they want to be teachers for the long term by extending the requirement from 5 to closer to 7 years might serve us all well and be fairer to the teachers involved.
43 jd2718
· Aug 23, 2006 at 1:33 pm
And Paul,
we could also talk about improving the overall quality of the masters programs. I am not talking about content area masters, but those in education.
Certainly math_teacher’s resentment at having some of his time wasted is understandable. I remember when I was working on my masters, I found all of the math classes useful, but only about half of the ed classes (although, I thought my Ed Psych was a complete waste, but in retrospect has been helpful).
I am glad the requirement for the extra courses in human relations have been dropped. Most people I spoke with thought that these were busy work courses.
But when ken and math_teacher want principals to hire people from good colleges, and that’s it, there is a problem. Who is going to judge what a good college is? And how would we keep anyone teaching for more than three years?
44 Persam1197
· Aug 23, 2006 at 3:19 pm
Math Teacher,
I think you have missed my point. My point in saying “Children are not widgets” highlights that there is no empirical data beyond standardized testing. If data is to be used in deciding instructional quality, where will this data come from? From the new crop of administrators who are managers rather than educators, who may not even have had sufficient experience to be tenured in their own license areas?
The argument for and against merit pay revolves around the same desire for data.
The fact that you had poor professors does not mean that we all had the same level of poor instruction that you had. I had quality instruction in education and content.
45 paulrubin
· Aug 23, 2006 at 5:19 pm
While not perfect, I thought my education training (both degrees) at NYU was quite useful. Would I want changes to such programs? Of course. But I don’t believe you do the profession a service by making the requirements for entry easier than they are. They’re already too easy which is one of the reasons why the pay doesn’t measure up and why too many people leave the system right away and why those that are in the system are perceived as inferior to those from 20, 30 and 40 years ago.
Some of us simply proceeding from a false assumption. That assumption being that we can get better teachers by scraping the bottom of the barrel academically simply because there will be more warm bodies to choose from. And at the same time, we provide ourselves during said experiment, with an excuse not to raise teacher salaries. I proceed from a different assumption. Teaching is already not the most challenging profession to enter. It already requires less training than many other professions (not to do well but to do it period). For decades, the powers that be have forgotten one simple reality, that the steady supply of potential teachers, namely women in the workforce, has dried up because women now have a wealth of other options. Women didn’t need to be paid as much because their jobs were secondary to their husbands’ and if they were single, that situation was temporary anyway. Attitudes in the private sector interestingly enough get criticized more but are actually ahead of the curve when compared to the reality of teaching. We routinely wouldn’t question the need for advanced training and a superior resume for doctors, lawyers, and the like because those are “real professions” for men. This is, in fact, the underlying attitude behind the scenes that has weakened public K-12 education in recent decades. So we’ll increase class size, tolerate people teaching subjects they’re not qualified for, or at best underqualified for. We’ll search for teachers around the globe rather than hire Americans to teach Americans. We’ll even pay lip service to the kids and feign more demands on them rather than less while requiring less of our teachers by taking the power to decide how best to teach out of their hands. Imagine lawyers like Klein ordered to defend their clients in a one size all fits mentality. Maybe there’s a best way to be a cashier at Target. And maybe there’s a best way to pump gas at Sunoco. Or perhaps there’s a best way to put new siding on a house. But there is no best way to educate all kids in all subjects at all times in their life, in any possible combination of students making up a class. And that ability is as much art as science, and requires far more training to do well than even our most experienced teachers with 2 and even 3 degrees have. We need to expect more, pay more, and require more of our teachers. The argument should be why don’t our teachers have doctorates.
46 jd2718
· Aug 23, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Paul,
If the requirements are set too high, the number of applicants will be too low, and the DoE and State Ed will use that shortfall as a window to let all sorts of genuinely unqualified people in. I think the trick is to set the requirements high enough to retain some quality (one of those qualities is persistence) but not so high as to remove too many applicants from the pool.
Jonathan
47 NYC Educator
· Aug 23, 2006 at 9:01 pm
Jonathan,
You’re still assuming that the DoE cares whether or not they have quality teachers. I’ve come to believe that’s not the way it is.
Good teachers? Great. Our programs are paying off. Too bad we can’t afford to give them cost of living, but we can’t count on keeping this budget surplus.
Bad teachers? Great. They stink and we don’t have to pay them. Let’s open some charters without all that union nonsense.
I agree with every word Paul wrote, and I think it’s remarkable that after 22 years of watching the wonks come up with one way, then another, and then another, they’ve never figured out that it’s possible there are various ways to communicate.
This is the same mentality that declared five-paragraph-compositions were the be-all and end-all of writing, and that Moses carried them down the mountain along with the Ten Commandments.
And they got paid way more than we ever will to come up with those pronouncements they discard each and every year. Of course, if they didn’t do that, how could they justify keeping those jobs?
48 Math_Teacher
· Aug 23, 2006 at 9:04 pm
As I said, “I believe that some programs make some people better teachers.” Not all of my ed school professors were poor, but (1) those who were bad really stunk it up, and (2) the overall level of quality was far below what I got as an undergrad. (Lest you say again that this was just one guy’s experience, I would say this was acknowledged by the chair of the ed department and was also supported by surveys of Fellows’ experience at large.) Unlike some, I try not to generalize from a single datum.
So I know there are some who got quality instruction, and I’m glad, Persam, you “had quality instruction in education” yourself. As I’m sure you will be the first to say, this does not mean that everyone does. Again, it’s the quality of training and thinking that matters, and we can’t settle for the poor quality (on average) of ed schools of today.
I am curious about your statement that “there is no empirical data beyond standardized testing”. I am guessing we agree that the existing tests in NYC/NYS fall short. What would you suggest as better? Are credit attainment or college acceptance any better, in your opinion? If not, is there anything that would serve as a measure of doing right by students? (I am particularly interested in how you can say that getting the piece of paper that is a master’s diploma is so worthwhile when passing a standardized test is not.)
Finally, Paul, I am intrigued by your last post. Do you think doctorates would really help teachers teach better? I ask because I have heard quite the opposite from those who have completed them; even those who did well and enjoyed their experience said it was more interesting in the insight they gained into the field from a research perspective than beneficial to their teaching practice. (On this point, I have no real data; I’m curious.)
49 jd2718
· Aug 23, 2006 at 11:28 pm
NYC Educator,
we agree. What should done, and what the DoE does, not the same thing, we know that.
They really don’t care how high the standards are set, they know they will get major league exceptions to get whoever they want in.
Jonathan
50 paulrubin
· Aug 24, 2006 at 1:11 am
My real opinion about doctorates goes something like this. In the short term, the addition of a new salary step above Masters + 30 would allow the DOE to claim much higher salaries (say another $10K for attaining that). So if the next contract were say 10% over 3 years plus this new step, top salary would go from $93,000 to over $112,000. That’s a number that would make people sit up and take notice much as they do in the top districts in the suburbs. The trick is, almost nobody would get that salary initially, and it would literally take 5 to 10 years for it to really factor into the annual school costs in a significant way. The beauty is, the media would take it and run much as they did with the extra time monies. They’d say we’re getting a 20% raise, that NYC salaries now exceeded many of the suburban salaries, etc. etc. The system would attract more teaching candidates from both colleges and private industry. Now that’s my thought out opinion on the subject.
With respect to making it mandatory? No I wouldn’t do that. Even at those numbers, teacher salaries aren’t high enough to demand three degrees. They’re not really high enough to demand two degrees. As to whether the doctorates would make for better teachers? Only if teachers were given enough freedom and flexibility to make use of the research skills being developed while involved in those advanced programs. I don’t believe current doctorate programs are suitable for the job. There would have to be changes.
But yes, people who truly love education as a career probably wouldn’t mind pursuing education themselves to further their own knowledge and skill set and expose themselves to others of that same ilk. The problem again, is salary. The lower the salary, the less reasonable it is to expect advanced degrees. And my solution isn’t to eliminate the advanced degrees as a salary deflating measure but rather to find ways to increase teacher salaries. On that front I toe the party line of the union. Where the union and I disagree is that all teachers should be paid equally based on years of service. I firmly believe that something along the lines of 80% of a teacher’s salary should be based strictly on that and degrees, etc. and the remaining monies should be moved around year to year to pay those teachers working under hard to find licenses. Pay math, science, etc. teachers an extra $20K a year until those skillsets are not in short supply and move those monies around license by license annually as other shortages develop. It’s called supply and demand. In combination with my doctorate idea, teachers would be paid sufficiently in the areas that are most difficult to staff but over time, those extra monies can be redeployed as needed. This country uses monetary means to affect policy all the time. How is it any different that giving tax breaks for hybrid car purchases? How long would NYC have a math teacher shortage if math teachers were making $130,000 a year on maximum? I bet the shortage would end within 5 years as prospective engineers, accountants, business majors, etc. shifted gears to take advantage. Then you’d create a shortage of say english teachers and adjust accordingly.
51 Persam1197
· Aug 24, 2006 at 3:23 pm
Math_Teacher,
Every one of us is a consumer for this product we call education. I chose a school that had an outstanding rating in both English and education. Why would you tolerate and invest in a substandard program? I understand that there are poor professors out there, but it’s our responsibility to get the very best since we’re paying for it.
“I am particularly interested in how you can say that getting the piece of paper that is a master’s diploma is so worthwhile when passing a standardized test is not.”
Interesting question! Is the value of your students limited to the Regents only? Is the standardized exam the only way to ascertain true content knowledge? Of course not! State exams do not measure how hardworking a student is, nor does it factor in multiple levels of intelligence. For example, the NYS ELA standards require students to articulate ideas verbally (oral reports, speeches, class discussions, seminars, etc.). The ELA Regents does not test for this. It merely asks students to write four essays and answer multiple-choice questions. Is this all that education boils down to? Of course not! (No college accepts students based on SAT’s only). By that token, standardized tests for graduate students simply measure one small facet of education. The Masters’ candidate has presumably interacted with an array of professors who have graded a with a wide variety of criteria (e.g. value of research, oral presentations, thesis, participation, exams, essays, etc.). In other words, the degree (from a quality institution) is a testimony of the whole student rather than a slice of that student’s capabilities in the form of a high-stakes test. We even graduate with “honors,”
“magna cum laude,” “summa cum laude,” “dean’s list,” etc.
Your last comment on your associates who feel that acquiring an advanced degree was limited in its usefulness in the classroom is also interesting. My work in research helps many teachers teach the process to their own students. You can’t teach what you don’t know. You can’t prepare kids to increase their value in the marketplace if your own erudition is limited in content and scope.
52 Leo Casey
· Aug 24, 2006 at 6:35 pm
I have been on the one week vacation I have had this summer, with my family, so I have missed most of the dialogue as it took place. I would point two things:
1. The study which is being cited here regarding TFA teachers compared them with other novice teachers without a full ed school preparation. It tells us nothing about TFA teachers vs. properly prepared teachers. If one compares unprepared [TFA] teachers from more academically rigorous institutions with unprepared [non-TFA] teachers from less academically rigorous institutions, it is hardly surprising that the the TFA teachers are marginally better. But that comparison is like announcing the tallest building in Topeka, Kansas — it is tall only because the real competition in major urban centers has been eliminated from the comparison. How do TFA teachers compare to properly prepared teachers?
I make this point because I began teaching via the TFA route before there was a TFA route — an ABD toward a doctorate in political science, but without any education preparation. I learned how to be a good teacher not just because of the hard work of a workaholic personality and a strong mastery of the subject material, but just as importantly, because of the good luck of having an excellent mentor in my Assistant Principal and being in a functional school where real learning could go on. I could easily see why many, if not most, teachers coming to the job similarly unprepared in pedagogy never acquired those essential skills.
2. The fact that ed schools often do a poor job of preparing teachers is not a proof that one can do without a PROPER preparation to teach; as a matter of logic, it demonstrates only that this ed school, like a number of others, does not do the job it says it is doing. Using Ockham’s razor, the first hypothesis that one should test is whether there are good ed schools which do a good job of preparing teachers, in which case the obvious solution would be to reform or close ed schools that are not doing their job and to model more after those that are successful — not to send yet more unprepared teachers into schools [invariably high poverty schools] where they have to learn how to teach under the most difficult conditions, with the students paying the consequences.