Let’s talk about fundamental human needs.
We start with water, food, and shelter, of course. Clothing, safety. People need to eat and keep warm to stay alive. The most basic essentials.
Probably the next most fundamental need is medicine. People need healthcare so that they don’t get sick or so they don’t die when they do. It’s pretty important. So we hire the best and the brightest to be doctors, and we pay them really well and expect them to go through a very strenuous education and training because after all, we’re putting a lot in their hands. A lot is at stake. People might die if they mess up.
After medicine, I think it’s reasonable to argue that education is the next most essential need. People need to know how to do stuff so that they can eventually provide for themselves. They also need to know about the world around them. It’s pretty important. Especially in the modern Western world, education typically has a dramatic impact on quality of life. If teachers don’t do a good job, young people might not learn things, they might drop out of school, they might not go to college, they might not get good jobs, they might give up on their dreams, they might end up being fairly ignorant of the world…
And yet, though we do hire some bright people to be teachers, frankly, we also hire a lot of dopes. We don’t make it challenging or competitive for people to attain the education and training needed to become teachers. We don’t pay them well, so the best and brightest usually find it more worthwhile to work in other fields where their talent is more appreciated. (I wish money didn’t play such a big role, but it does. And if we made the field more rigorous, we could still weed out the majority of those who “are only in it for the money.”)
It looks like I and probably the majority of my classmates will all be getting A’s in everything in our MA program at the “prestigious” NYU Steinhardt. Straight A’s for mediocre work. At one of the top-ranked education schools in the country.
That makes me really sad.
It also looks like it’s not even that hard to get a PhD out of this institution. Not only can one of my professors – a Steinhardt alum – not teach, but she also can’t write. Yet she has a PhD from the same department I’m in now.
That makes me really angry.
We’re not only hiring bad educators, but we’re hiring bad educators to educate future educators.
Looks like we need No Teacher Left Behind more than No Child Left Behind.
We start with water, food, and shelter, of course. Clothing, safety. People need to eat and keep warm to stay alive. The most basic essentials.
Probably the next most fundamental need is medicine. People need healthcare so that they don’t get sick or so they don’t die when they do. It’s pretty important. So we hire the best and the brightest to be doctors, and we pay them really well and expect them to go through a very strenuous education and training because after all, we’re putting a lot in their hands. A lot is at stake. People might die if they mess up.
After medicine, I think it’s reasonable to argue that education is the next most essential need. People need to know how to do stuff so that they can eventually provide for themselves. They also need to know about the world around them. It’s pretty important. Especially in the modern Western world, education typically has a dramatic impact on quality of life. If teachers don’t do a good job, young people might not learn things, they might drop out of school, they might not go to college, they might not get good jobs, they might give up on their dreams, they might end up being fairly ignorant of the world…
And yet, though we do hire some bright people to be teachers, frankly, we also hire a lot of dopes. We don’t make it challenging or competitive for people to attain the education and training needed to become teachers. We don’t pay them well, so the best and brightest usually find it more worthwhile to work in other fields where their talent is more appreciated. (I wish money didn’t play such a big role, but it does. And if we made the field more rigorous, we could still weed out the majority of those who “are only in it for the money.”)
It looks like I and probably the majority of my classmates will all be getting A’s in everything in our MA program at the “prestigious” NYU Steinhardt. Straight A’s for mediocre work. At one of the top-ranked education schools in the country.
That makes me really sad.
It also looks like it’s not even that hard to get a PhD out of this institution. Not only can one of my professors – a Steinhardt alum – not teach, but she also can’t write. Yet she has a PhD from the same department I’m in now.
That makes me really angry.
We’re not only hiring bad educators, but we’re hiring bad educators to educate future educators.
Looks like we need No Teacher Left Behind more than No Child Left Behind.
“As a sociologist named Dan Lortie puts it, America has always chosen to secure an adequate number of teachers, not with money or status, but by making it easy to become a teacher.” -Tracy Kidder in 1989 in Among Schoolchildren
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