Joshua D. Angrist Jonathan Guryan, “Does teacher testing raise teacher quality? Evidence from state certification requirements,” Economics of Education Review 27, no. 5 (October 2008): 483-503
Thomas J. Kane, Jonah E. Rockoff, and Douglas O. Staiger, “What Does Certification Tell Us About Teacher Effectiveness? Evidence from New York City,” Economics of Education Review 27, no. 6 (December 2008): 615–631
Donald J. Boyd, Pamela L. Grossman, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff, “Teacher Preparation and Student Achievement,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 31, no. 4 (December 2009): 416–440
Etc., Etc.
The small exception is high school math IIRC.
Teacher experience does matter. Hanushek studied this but I don’t remember where the cutoff was. Maybe two years or so. That, of course, is in a classroom setting.
The political and business interests that form ‘The State’ have a compelling interest in the level of literacy and the compatibility of belief systems throughout the work force and consumer base. That uniformity of belief is established through public education. The 6000 year old earth belief is not an independent variable. A lot of stuff comes with it.
I just remembered a man in my old town who, after he retired from full-time teaching, did some per diem work as a homebound tutor. I assumed that he was mostly teaching kids who couldn’t go to school due to health issues - a child with cancer, a teenage girl having a complicated pregnancy, that kind of thing - and he said he did do that, but most of them were kids who couldn’t attend school because of behavioral issues and their parents (or, more commonly, legal guardians) couldn’t be trusted to provide them with an education.
There’s also a meme floating around Facebook that parents can now “correct” their kids as they see fit (i.e. beat them into submission) because CPS won’t be breathing down their neck now that school isn’t in session. Oh, really?
The kid gymnast I mentioned earlier who did gym 6 hours a day and therefore had to homeschool, had a tutor. The families on the pro bowling tour who homeschooled, worked it out together. So like while 1 mother taught the 3 year olds, another the 5’s, and another the older ones. Plus they had the benefit of every week being in a different location so they can go on constant field trips to new locations.
In Hollywood, child actors have tutors on set.
I’ve also known parents, well its not exactly homeschool, but they pool money and hire a tutor and said tutor/teacher teaches 3,4,5 kids or so in someones living room or such.
I’m probably misunderstanding you but you seem to care more about the years than the credentials. It seems that you would want parents to have 10 years of teaching prior to teaching home school. So 10 years of elementary education prior to teaching k-6, 10 years of middle school prior to teaching 7 & 8, and then 10 years each of high school English, math, science, and history.
I think that is a reasonable proposal and I’m glad you made it. It solves the worthless credential problem and still allows for tutors that Urban is bringing up. Overall an elegant solution.
This is a correct assessment based on the rest of your post, which is grounded in neither anything I posted nor in the academic literature on the economics of education.
You are correct. You want 2 years for each and a certificates and education for math at the high school level. You haven’t been clear on if that two years is by grade or not.
So a minimum of 2 years of in classroom time for k-6, the two years of 7-8 and then a batchlors degree in math and 2 years of english, history, and science. Thanks for getting me to go back and check so i don’t misunderstood you.
That seems to mean the requirement to be q home school teach through high school would be a batchlors degree in math and 10 years of class room time at various levels. I don’t think many people would argue with that standard.
Sounds like you have little interest in making an argument on your own behalf, more like.
You said “Teacher tests, qualifications, and benchmarks are for public school teachers. Nobody ever required these of me. They’re mostly useless box-checking to provide a barrier to entry to the profession, as they typically aren’t associated with better student outcomes.”
You then “backed” that assertion with a glurge of headlines that did not actually back your statement. Your articles, at best, indicate that testing and certification, above and beyond what is required to get a teaching license in the first place does not necessarily correlate with significantly better student outcomes.
None of the articles that you “cite” claim that someone without a degree in teaching or a license to teach is as effective an educator as someone without.
You have done very poorly at bolstering your own argument, at this point it rests soley on your personal experience of being home schooled and feeling that you turned out alright.
So, your dodge of the question as to what requirements or qualifications you would ask of a parent that wishes to homeschool their own children indicates to me that you do not think that there should be any requirements or regulations over parents of guardians as educators.
Just an anecdote, I know, but one particularly close to me:
My niece was homeschooled. I was skeptical at first when my sister told me, but she turned out great.
They are very liberal and homeschooled mainly because they thought local schools are too conservative. They are strong atheists too.
My sister has Ph.D. in biology and her husband is a high school science teacher. So there was never any question about their qualifications. In fact it was my brother-in-law’s experience teaching in the public schools that convinced them not to send their daughter there.
As for social interactions, that turned out to be no problem at all. My niece has turned out to be one of most social, extroverted people I’ve ever known. I’m not sure how that happened but I know she was exposed to many social experiences.
She even got into a good college and is now a graduate student in mathematics at a prestigious university.
Fundamentally I now believe homeschooling should be allowed. Just because it can lead to bad outcomes isn’t justification to restrict it.
Apparently three articles out of hundreds in a widely-studied field is a “glurge”. They were a courtesy for those who haven’t yet researched the topic but who are able and willing to fight their own ignorance. And who are no doubt appreciative of the curation, rather than a punch-these-terms-into-SciFinder dump.
One factor that makes this topic easier to study is that so-called “requirements” often aren’t actually required, and so we can measure outcomes from teacher who both do and do not meet them, i.e. certified, uncertified, and alternatively certified teachers. As is discussed in the first paper. The second discusses how there appear to be difference in efficacy for teachers coming out of different training programs, but pinning down the origin of those differences is challenging. The third discusses how while increasing requirements for teachers generally doesn’t improve students outcomes, it does increase pay. Which isn’t surprising, as that’s the expected result of raising barriers to entry into the profession. While my ideal world would have teachers paid more, excluding potentially good teachers is not IMO a good way to do it.
My apologies, to the able and willing who actually read those papers, for taking up space with the explanation.
Ignoring JAQs is generally good policy that I recommend others follow.
Pointing out the flaws in a proposal does not obligate me to offer an alternative one.
Generally one synthesizes the available information first, then makes a policy recommendation. The general trend in this thread seems to be the reverse. If you’re interested in an IMHO poll, knock yourself out. That doesn’t interest me.
The two policy extremes are Do Nothing and Ban It. I suspect the optimum is somewhere between, although I could be wrong about that. We (or some of us) are trying to minimize abuse and maximize education.
I am wary of proposals that levy requirements that we don’t even impose on all teachers in public schools, let alone at private schools (which often aren’t even legally required to be accredited), and which are inconsistent, per many studies, with improved student outcomes. We should be reconsidering these hiring policies, not imposing them elsewhere.
I know, from my coursework on the economics of education and on teaching that there is vast literature, which I’ve barely scraped, showing what doesn’t improve educational outcomes, but that pinning down factors that improve them is difficult.
I am wary of enabling school districts like the one that told us they’d keep us from homeschooling if they could, but that they couldn’t. It was a full year and a half behind the district we’d moved from and would be moving back to. I am wary of enabling the Trump administration and Betsy DeVos from setting some sort of “common understanding of citizenship”. Or fundie republican states and districts from mandating curricula. See, for example, Texas’ meddling with the content of history books.
I know, from personal teaching experience both in-classroom and one-on-one, that handling a classroom requires a set of skills that are irrelevant in one-on-one instruction.
I know, from attending five different non-home-schools in grades 1-8 that school quality varies widely. And from siblings attending the same schools, that not everyone thrives in the same environment.
I know that when measuring student outcomes for individual teachers, it’s hard enough to get a good analysis in a school setting, where you have multiple teachers and multiple students. If students are randomly assigned, then you can measure improvement with different combinations of teachers and back out the contributions of individual teachers. This doesn’t work with one teacher and one student. You can see how a student improves year over year, but you can’t back out how he or she could have done in a different setting.
As others have pointed out, we generally don’t require people to prove they’re not committing crimes. I suspect we could reduce abuse by mandating in-home inspections even of children who are in public schools, but that people would find that overly intrusive.
But I also know that children are neglected and abused, and that it’s easier to neglect and abuse a child as contact with outsiders, especially with mandated reporters, decreases. And that while it’s possible to stay one page ahead of a student or even learn something together, someone who is completely illiterate or innumerate seems unlikely to succeed in instructing others. Although I’ve not actually seen that studied.
And so given all the above, I suspect any improved policy will require significant analysis and nuance. And so I could jump on the Dunning–Kruger party you’re asking me to join and drop some pithy, uninformed turd with little substance beyond “we should regulate it.” But I prefer to do things my way. Some readers will choose to learn from that, but nobody is forced to.