Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for December 12, 2007 SMARTER, BUT BETTER?

The question is..."Will they stay?"

Wait until they walk into the classroom and meet their "eager to learn", "thirsting for knowledge" charges! Wait until they are threatened with firing if the school doesn't meet AYP. Wait until they send a student to the office for disrupting their finely tuned lesson plans...and get the student back in 15 minutes, with no change in behavior. Wait until...

Enough shtuff goes on that they can't control...it's enough to make a nun cuss!

Report Finds Better Scores in New Crop of Teachers

By SAM DILLON

Teaching is attracting better-qualified people than it did just a few years ago, according to a report released Tuesday by the Educational Testing Service.

Prospective teachers who took state teacher licensing exams from 2002 to 2005 scored higher on SATs in high school and earned higher grades in college than their counterparts who took the exams in the mid-1990s, the report said.

On the other hand, the report found that those attracted to the profession continued to make up a strikingly homogeneous group — prospective teachers were overwhelmingly white and female — at a time when the proportion of public school students nationwide who are black, Hispanic or other minorities was nearly half and rising.

The finding that the academic qualifications of teachers had risen significantly was encouraging news for federal and state education policy makers after a period of hand-wringing over teacher quality in the nation’s 90,000 public schools. The most successful educational systems in the world, like those in Singapore and Finland, recruit teachers from among the top third of their college graduates. By contrast, some studies over the years have found that the United States recruits from the bottom third.

“We’re seeing a pretty big jump in qualifications,” said Drew H. Gitomer, the researcher who led the study.

Educational researchers debate, however, whether teachers with higher academic qualifications are more effective, as measured by higher student achievement.

Dr. Gitomer said he and his colleagues at the testing service based their conclusions on a comparison of the academic profiles of 153,000 aspiring teachers from 20 states who took licensing exams from 2002 to 2005, with the profiles of about 140,000 teachers from the same states who took the licensing exams from 1994 to 1997.

The testing service, based in Princeton, N.J., produces a series of teacher licensing exams, known as the Praxis tests, which assess academic competency in more than 100 subject areas. Dozens of states have adopted the Praxis tests as their teacher licensing exams, Dr. Gitomer said.

The average SAT verbal scores of prospective teachers passing the Praxis tests to teach English, science, social studies, math and art from 2002 to 2005 were higher than those of prospective teachers in the mid-1990s — and were also higher than the average SAT scores for all college graduates, the report said.

The SAT scores of prospective teachers who took the licensing tests in elementary education and physical education, however, were significantly below the average for all college graduates, it said.

The college grades of prospective teachers has also improved. About 40 percent of the prospective teachers taking the licensing tests from 2002 to 2005 had a grade point average of 3.5 or higher on the traditional 4-point scale during college, up from 26 percent in the 1990s, the report said.

The percentage of candidates earning lower than a 3.0 G.P.A. decreased to 20 percent from 32 percent.

“By this measure, we are witnessing a dramatic improvement in the quality of the teacher pool,” the report said.

Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a group that helps urban districts recruit teachers, said the report offered statistical confirmation of anecdotal information from human-resources officers in dozens of school districts around the nation.

“The quality of folks coming into the profession is rising,” Mr. Daly said. “Lots of people are seeing this. There’s been a bump in the overall pool.”