I wouldn’t want my child to be taught by someone who can’t pass a compentency test set at 8-10th grade level. At the same time, I understand the need to get more people of color in to be teachers and role models to all children, especially to children of color.
Is this simply “dumbing down” of our children for the sake of political correctness, or can taking away this requirement really improve the school system by making it more ethnically diverse? Is there a solution?
As someone who has taken the CBEST (and passed) I must say that I don’t agree with the state’s assertion that it is set at an “8th to 10th grade” level. It’s not an easy test and the time restrictions make it even more challenging.
That said, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that teacher candidates pass it. There are a lot of workshops and classes available to those who are having trouble passing it. I think the children of California would be better served if the state underwrote the cost of these classes rather than making exemptions.
I assume that teachers are required to attend college and take courses on education. That being said, I don’t see how color affects the issue. A black person able to get a degree should have no more difficulty passing this test as a white person based on their own personal abilities. I’d like to think that at the college level, anyone who can’t cut it will wash before they get their degree.
The second linked article, the one arguing against the test, employs a lot of circular reasoning and other logical problems. Example: student test scores correlate to “tracking” in gifted programs or special-ed programs. Well, so? Special ed or gifted programs should draw kids at random from the general student population?
I’m not sure what the advantage, in and of itself, of diversity is, anyway. I don’t send the kid to school to be social-engineered, I send her to be educated. Given the choice between scenario 1: all teachers are white OR black OR Asian OR Hispanic, etc., and all can pass competency test; or scenario 2: a diverse group of teachers, some of which match her ethnicity, but some of which can’t pass competency test; I would pick scenario 1 every time. I’d think that was a no-brainer. Apparently not.
To be certified (as a teacher, at least) I had to take the PPST (Pre-Professional Skills Test). Aside from the fact that I think that standardized tests are bogus (based in part on a tremendous amount of date showing they are, and in part on the fatc that I received a perfect score on the math test and I’m not really a genius in math), I have to say that it doesn’t really meausre competency as a teacher.
The amount of math I use in teaching is minute. The number of essays my bro Gar (a math teacher) has had to write professionally is zero. We weren’t tested on our knowledge of our subject areas, and of course not tested on whether we like teaching, like students, motivate, come up with interesting and useful classes, etc.
In short, the test isn’t really going to tell you if I am competent or not–it’s fools’ gold.
It was a waste of my money and a Saturday morning, in my opinion.
Bucky
P.S. Can we require a competency test for those who require a competency test?
I think the tests are meant to test basic literacy and competence, not knowledge of your specific area of teaching. When I received my teaching degree in Maryland, we were also required to take a basic competency test. The questions were about basic math, grammar, and reading comprehension. Mastery in all of these areas is necessary to teach. For instance, if you are an English teacher and need to figure out a grading system that uses percentages, you need to know how to figure percentages. Besides, what kind of credibility would you have as a teacher who misspelled comments on a student’s paper?
I really don’t think it’s too much to ask of our teachers that they be able to read, write, and do basic math.
In the California case, is the argument that the test itself is racially biased? Or has it been concluded that the test is not racially biased, but it’s just not fair because minorities aren’t performing as well as whites? I think if it can be determined that the test itself is discriminatory, then the test needs to be rewritten. If the test is fair as written, then this problem needs to be approached in a different way. One suggestion would be to actively recruit achieving minority high school students to education programs, offering scholarships and other incentives.
I think it would be a disservice to the students to release semi-illiterate or otherwise incompetent teachers into the schools.
Standardized tests will be easier for peoplle who have taken a lot of them. They are harder for people who didn’t use Kaplan classes, have test anxiety, etc. Regardless of ethnicity, they are not wholy “objective.”
The PPST is used in about 30 states. The math part includes disecting angles, geemetry, and lagebra. I have never used these in class. “Basic math” would be more likely to describe addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fraction, and percentages.
Competence does not equal mastery. I don’t care if my math teacher isn’t a master of punlic speaking as long as she is competent.
I would stll contend that the most important areas (and those least likely to be testable on a standardized test) include:
public speaking
creating a syllabus
assessment methods
classroom management
love of the subject
love of students
I’m willing to accept an art teacher who has to have someone else figure the grades if she can teach me art–I would much rather have her than someone who aces the PPST but tells me that my cat looks like a turd, that I suck, and has me making clay ashtrays all year.
Like I said, if the test is racially biased, it should be rewritten. Otherwise, I don’t see anything wrong with requiring teachers to be competent in the basics. I would argue that algebra & geometry are the basics. My degree is in Secondary English Education (I don’t currently teach). I use algebra almost every day (and not at work…just in my day-to-day life).
I would also argue that it is NOT okay for an art teacher to be able to teach art but not able to figure out the grades. The teacher is being paid to do much more than stand up in front of the class and teach. My husband is a physical therapist. Part of his job is to manage his clinic. Part of that is to stick to his budget, type up certain reports, and keep track of time sheets (among other things). That is what he is being paid to do. If he decides that he is really good at treating people, but that he isn’t as good at typing up those reports, it would not be acceptable for him to get me to do it. HE is being paid to do it. Same goes for teachers.
[b}I’m willing to accept an art teacher who has to have someone else figure the grades if she can teach me art–I would much rather have her than someone who aces the PPST but tells me that my cat looks like a turd, that I suck, and has me making clay ashtrays all year.**
I’d rather have an art teacher who can teach art, figure out the class’ grades, be a nice person, AND pass the PPST.
Yes, I would rather have your second person, too. What are the odds that we’ll have enough people who are perfect to do the job?
In regards to my teaching English–why, have I dangled a participle? I scored a 99 on the English part of the PPST, and have taught it in the past. Is this a dig, a critique, or just a joke? (bjOrn has infected my brain!)
And if your cat does look like a turd, you do suck, and your teacher has you making clay ashtrays all year because you’re barely competent to do even thar, but have to be kept in the class somehow?
Shall the teacher lie outright?
I will make a counter-suggestion, and a counter-proposal: education courses are bunk. Therefore, any person with an education degree should be permanently banned from holding a teaching or administrative position in any school teaching people under the age of eighteen. Anyone violating this rule in a public school shall be banned from government service for life, and also lose any emoluments that he or she has gained from such service. Anyone violating this rule in a private school shall immediately be charged with endangerment of a minor.
When this rule is implemented, I will accept a rule also barring competency testing as unnecessary at best.
“I don’t just want you to feel envy. I want you to suffer, I want you to bleed, I want you to die a little bit each day. And I want you to thank me for it.” – What “Let’s just be friends” really means
Actually, I’ll have to apologize for that, Bucky. Going back and rereading your posts, I can see that the mistakes can probably be attributed to typos, not grammatical errors.
As far as hiring competent teachers goes, I don’t think this problem will be solved by lowering the standards and getting rid of the competency tests. The tests should stay - we just need to make sure we hire people who are qualified to pass them. We can do this with incentives such as higher salaries, scholarships to achieving students, and more money to the school systems so that the teachers have a workplace that is safe and nurturing to their professional skills.
I don’t see the logic in saying, the test must be discriminatory because so many people are failing. To me, this signals that not enough competent people are taking the test (unless, of course, the test itself is racially biased, in which case, the test needs to be rewritten). I also don’t buy the “some people are really bad at taken timed tests” argument. For people who have this particular problem, most test-givers will make exceptions and allow a privately administered test to be taken that is not timed. I don’t know if this is the case with the PPST, but it was with the test I took in MD.
I also want to add (I keep having these afterthoughts after I hit “reply”) that I think colleges who turn out a high number of people who can’t pass the competency test should have their accreditation reviewed. I can’t imagine a college graduate not being able to pass a simple competency test…certainly you should be able to do at least some advanced math, read at a high school + level, and be able to understand basic grammar by the time you graduate college. It sickens me that people get degrees without being able to do these things.
Akatsukami, I can think of a lot of majors that had far less stringent programs than the education program I was in. You couldn’t even get into the education program at my university without a 3.0 GPA and certain class requirements (3 years of a foreign language in HS, certain level of math, etc.). Those Business and Government & Politics majors, just to name a couple, are certainly not the people I want teaching my kid.
Akat–isn’t part of the teacher’s job to have me become less sucky? (yes, what lovely English). We don’t make teachers (or much of anyone else, for that matter) pass personality tests to see if they are suited for the job. Perhaps we should.
BTW, on what basis have you decided that education courses are bunk? I’m not challenging the assertion, merely wondering how you determined it.
I love teaching, and I have usually enjoyed being a student. But I think we’ve all had teachers who were “competent” in their field of study (art, biology, etc.) who is incompetent in teaching–they hate students or parents or other teachers or whatever.
I agree with C3 that teachers should be competent. But I don’t think that a standardized test is the means to detemine this. Standardized tests are easier, not automatically better. Perhaps the debate is really two:
What makes a competent teacher?
Are standardized tests effective?
P.S. I DO make lots of typos–I suck at typing. But I’m much better at typing than at art! (Anyone know how to do spell check when posting?)
Maybe a good start at making sure we have competent teachers is making sure that no one who can’t read at a certain level and perform basic math can either a. enter college or b. graduate from college.
Perhaps we need to start measuring competency before these people actually hit the workforce. How can we do that? Just have professors fail people who cannot read, write, or perform simple math (in the appropriate classes). I can’t tell you how many essays for history or government classes that I proofread for friends when I was in school that were filled with atrocious grammar, spelling, and logic.
If I made any spelling or grammar mistakes in the above post, forgive me…I can already see a sentence that just stinks.
I’m going to make the excuse of “I’m at work and not paying as much attention to what I type as I should.”
In nursing, a school’s accredidation is directly tied in to the percentage of its graduates that pass the board exams. The school my mom taught in, in San Antonio, went ballistic if the pass rate fell below 95%. They turned out very good nurses.
The school she’s now in charge of and trying to rescue has a pass rate of around 83%, and it shows in the quality of nurses.
By all means, the same standards should be applied to teaching. What I’m finding right now, though, is that the exams are necessary to be admitted into a teacher accreditation program. I suspect, having taken three of the six exams I need, that the tests are quite a bit easier than anything a newly graduated BSN has to worry about.
I think I’d like to see it turned around. Perhaps a preliminary exam for acceptance into the program, and then licensing exams afterward. Then, tie the education school’s credentials into the pass rate.
I am in the midst of my education classes, and I have to agree that they are bunk, especially for someone going into secondary ed. There is some valuble information to be gained about classroom management and theroies of education, but what could be covered in three intensive classes (normal classes for say engineering or even history) is spread out over 30+ hours. Furthermore, since the first half of the program is undifferentiated (primary and secondary educators of all stripes lumped together), and since primary education is really a more exoctic study, most of the last 15 hours of educatiton classes I have taken has focused specifically on primary ed. I get so angry at the way I am forced to waste my time.
This is the plan I like for certifing secondary educators:
Master’s degree in Subject Matter from a University that sends some of its graduates on to doctorial programs. No “teacher track” programs.
A summer long series of classes/seminars designed to introduce basic theories of ed psych and classroom management.
A semester long internship (student teaching).
Prospective teachers should be encouraged to independently observe other classrooms throughout this process, starting as undergraduates, and the documentation of that observation time ought to be included on resumes. (Logging 300 hours observing is likely to make someone a more attractive canidate for a position).
I think that if we set up a system like this we wouldn’t have to worry about general competency tests–a master’s degree ought to be sufficient proof of that. And Bucky, while I agree that there are teachers out there with subject mastery but who lack pedagological skills, my own experience, both as a public school student and in my education program is that there are many teachers that love to teach but do not have the subject knowledge to do so competently–biology teachers who know the text backwards and forewards but can not answer the simplest question outside its bounds, the history teacher who has only a foggy recognition of how the different chapters influence each other, math teachers who are dumbfounded by students who take shortcuts, English teachers who never quote books and can’t make recomendations outside the 20 year old cirriculum because that’s all they’ve ever read. These teachers are even worse than the ones that know much and can’t teach, because they show through their actions that the subject matter is not important or interesting enough to bother learning about any more than the absolute minumum required. And teachers that know little typically require less.
Someone alluded to it previously, but I want to steal the idea as my own: make the certification test a requirement for being degreed. As a history major, I had a big ‘senior thesis’ I had to write; my Mech Engineering roomie had to draft and build a machine in his class (as part of a group project).
Is it too much to ask that the potential teachers pass these tests before they get their degrees? If they can’t pass a basic competency test, maybe they shouldn’t be teaching (yet). Additionally, a big argument has been ‘well, I teach “x” and shouldn’t have to have exceptional skill in “y”’. Um, what about substitute teaching? I have teachers in my family, and they complain endlessly about how long they had to suffer as subs before they got a permanent gig. Wouldn’t we want substitutes that could at least show a little knowledge in a subject, or, “well, I’m an math teacher subbing for art…so I guess it’s heads-on-desks day”.
-sb
“This is going to take a special blend of psychology and extreme violence.”
In California, you have to pass the CBEST before you can even be a substitute.
As for Education courses being bunk: Yeah, they pretty much are. I’ve yet to make any real use out of Piaget, Vygotsky, Chomsky, Krashen, Cummins or any of the other Education gurus we were forced to study. I learn more on the job in one week than I ever learned in a semester long credential class.