An undergraduate degree in Education is essentially worthless. So are graduate degrees in same, for that matter. Teachers should have a degree in whatever they are planning to teach. Doesn’t always work out that way, but there are Ed Code sections that require parents to be notified if a teacher is teaching more than 40% of their class load in a subject they aren’t credentialed in. (California specific)
For a while I taught a course in the Cal State system that was a requirement for teachers-to-be and only for them. From the years I taught that course, I found about ¾ of the students were average to brilliant.
About a quarter of the class were some of the dumbest undergraduates I have ever met, and several of them (across multiple years) told me that they wanted to teach elementary school because they liked children and because you only had to know as much as [say] a third-grader. In other words, they were seeking out a career they perceived to be easy and to require minimal knowledge.
Needless to say, the course and program were designed to combat this particular mistaken impression, but it was very common.
Yes. Before you become a teacher in CA, you have to pass the CBEST or the equivalent. For all intents and purposes it is a entrance exam, it is the first legal step to getting your credential.
https://rossieronline.usc.edu/7-steps-to-become-a-teacher-in-california/
TEP 5: Complete the Certification Process.
The next step to becoming a teacher in California is to meet the basic skills and subject matter competency requirements. There are a number of ways to meet the basic skills requirements for California public school teachers (PDF, 172 KB) External link :
** Pass the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST).*
To meet the subject matter competency requirement for teachers in California (PDF, 410 KB) External link , prospects can:
** Earn a passing score on the appropriate subject-matter examination(s).*
** Complete a subject-matter program approved by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing and obtain verification of completion.*
Teachers who already have their credentials DO NOT take the test.
So a few things from a teacher that was credentialed in California.
The CBEST is a credentialing test because in California you cannot even get a substitute credential without passing the CBEST. The CBEST is effectively a test on middle-school math and English. Forgetting about what you are teaching for a second, wouldn’t it worry you if someone with a bachelor’s degree could not pass a middle-school math test?
Let’s take that one-step further. In California there is a test called the RICA (Reading Instruction Competency Test) that you must pass to get a multiple-subject credential (Elementary or Special Education). The state wanted to put out a MICA too (Math Instruction Competency Test). When they tested it on existing elementary and special ed teachers, the scores were so low that the state felt if there were a passing score that indicated true competency, most teacher candidates would never pass … and so they 86ed the test.
Working with elementary teachers, many do not teach math to any depth because they themselves do not know math to any depth and that results in them complaining that they don’t need to know middle-school math to teach elementary school while simultaneous not being able to come up with alternate ways to explain math concepts to their students and not being able to understand students’ mathematical processes that are outside the box.
And yes this extends to teacher training programs. A personal anecdote is that when taking a class on moderate to severe disability instruction, the professor purposefully schedule the math module on a week that she was at a conference so she wouldn’t have to teach it. I also taught a class “Mathematics for Elementary Teachers” in a community college. I have quite a few stories I could tell about the resistance these aspiring teachers had to learning ANY math.
So let’s get back to the OP of WHY this is happening. Very simply, we have a culture of it being acceptable to be horrible at math. Go back and reread everything I read but this time substitute “English” for “math”. Do you think society, parents and the state government would accept that or would there be a call for wholesale changes to the system?
I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that most people with a bachelor’s degree couldn’t pass a middle-school math test of the sort in the OP’s practice exam. At least not until they have kids in middle school and have to re-learn the material themselves to help explain it to their kids.
Elementary algebra and geometry are subjects that many people are capable of substantially forgetting in just a few years, or even less, if they’re not actively practicing them.
Most of the questions are basically arithmetic. None of them really use geometry and maybe a few could be said to use elementary algebra. And many of them are the kind of basic word problems that are a pretty useful skill in everyday life. This should absolutely not be the kind of test that a college grad should have any difficulty with.
Having said that it doesn’t really surprise me that significant numbers of education grads are failing the test. I have come to realize over the years that many supposedly educated people are basically innumerate and haven’t fully mastered middle-school mathematics.
Watch this truly gobsmacking video where Brian Williams and Mara Gay(NYTimes editorial board member) discuss a tweet which claims that Bloomberg spent $500 million which would have been enough to give each of the 327 million Americans a million dollars.
If you can’t instantly see that this is wrong you are basically innumerate. I doubt either of these two would have passed the Cal test. And there were also one or more MSNBC staffers (probably college-educated) who put up the tweet without noticing anything wrong.
An actual math educator disagrees with you:
He argues that it’s just how humans intuitively do mental math. They treat “millions” as a unit, and ignore it, because humans are bad with units. He doesn’t disagree that they should have caught it, but it doesn’t mean they are innumerate.
He’s studied how human brains are not really optimized for doing math, and there are so many math mistakes.
That works for some levels for some subjects - a high school math teacher should have a degree in math. But it doesn’t work so well for other levels and subjects - what degree should a a first-grade teacher have ? High schools social studies departments teach everything from history to psychology to economics to law - which degree should be required for a social studies teacher?
Certification programs generally have requirements for having taken certain numbers of courses, not any degree. So a person seeking science certification would need to have completed a short list of specific mandatory classes and some number of “science” classes. Then there is a content certification test. So you can be a physics major who only took Chem 101 and Bio 101 but still get certified in General Science, provided you can pass the content test. In TX, there are specific certs (like, Physics or History) and broader ones (Science or Social Studies).
It’s quite possible that someone with a degree in, like, business, could go to a certification program and, after a transcript review, be told “okay, you need to complete these X undergraduate courses, and then you can enroll in this program” or even “you need to take these content courses while taking the program courses” and then, in the end, have a teacher whose actual degree isn’t really related to their certification.
Here in the United States, I have to say that the educationally strongest generation we have are the Baby Boomers. Students were expected to do much more in an overall range of subjects than they are today. College entrance requirements were much stricter. Overall, parents were much more supportive of teachers and had higher expectations for their own children than they do today. When higher education became a big money business, your tuition became much more important than your level of education.
That’s why there are both Primary and Secondary Credential programs and different tests for each level. Primary has to be more broad-based. But, just because I happen to be a Social Studies teacher at the secondary level, I’ll use myself as an example. My degree (Liberal Studies) was useless in getting certified, other than the fact that I had to have one. So I took the Single Subject tests. I have credentials in English, Social Studies, Life Sciences and Physical Sciences. The Social Studies test is quite broad. There were elements of World History, US History, Anthropology, Psychology and several other areas. If they gave me a class that I didn’t know cold, I’d do what teachers and parents have been doing since Time began - I’d grab the book and try to stay a couple of chapters ahead of the students.
So the tests do reflect the areas that a teacher can be reasonably expected to teach, depending on the level.
The video offers a hypothesis for why people make such mistakes, apparently a very elementary confusion between division and subtraction while working with units. Even if it is true, I would still classify it as innumeracy. Avoiding such basic mistakes while solving very simple problems is a part of numeracy.
This would be me. I am bad at math. I always have been , I always will be. Some people just are.
We shouldn’t focus just on math. My understanding is that they are also failing the reading and writing competency sections.
This should be a national scandal. No one should be able to get into university, let alone a credentialed teaching profession, without being able to pass a basic literacy test. How are these people graduating high school? Who is letting them into college, and then into teaching positions?
If you are so bad at those three core subjects that you can’t pass them after high school, I think it speaks to more than ignorance of a specific subject. Either you aren’t very bright, or you did nothing in high school and were passed through it anyway.
If you can’t pass these subjects on the exam after multiple attempts either you aren’t college material or your school failed you miserably.
For clarity, I mean the generic ‘you’. Not anyone specific.
That’s OK. Most of us are bad at something. But I suspect even people who are bad at math can become numerate through sustained practice and study but are failed by the education system.
I think the basic mistake these systems make is to assume that people who pass middle school math have mastered the skills they have learnt for life. Those who are good at math have but there are many others who struggle and learn enough to pass exams but lose those skills as they grow older.
I think the solution is to make sure there is a constant stream of subjects which use core math skills heavily right till the time you pass high school and even the first year or two of college. There could be numeracy and elementary statistics classes but also subjects like personal finance. The key is to ensure people are continuously using ratios, percentages and elementary arithmetic year after year till they become second nature.
And there is a lot of material out there which is important for everyone to know but which only uses basic arithmetic: the base rate fallacy, Simpson’s paradox etc. For example the concept of base rate is crucial to interpreting test results for a disease.
What stuff can be cut? A lot of algebra, geometry, trigonometry etc. Teach the basic concepts but move the rest to optional classes.
There’s a lot of student athletes whose degree depends more on proficiency with a ball than the ability to spell it. Most of these are in extremely non-rigorous courses, but will take education credits to account for the vanishingly small chance that they don’t end up with a multi-million dollar NFL career.
When, as expected, 99 out of a hundred of these don’t get the contract they wanted they look around for alternatives and teaching will spring to mind. Even if they get a job teaching it’s not much damage to the profession, as they usually go into administration shortly after being hired.
Maybe, but if millions is a unit it cancels like a unit. 550 million dollars/330 million people is 550 dollars/330 people, or $1.67 per person. To drop the unit in half the equation and not realizing the result sounds way out of line is being innumerate.
It’s damaging to every kid they attempt to teach. I don’t give a damn about the ‘profession’.
The fact that black students do much worse should also be a scandal - for the schools that graduate them. We seem to look everywhere for excuses for poor minority academic achievement except for the most likely and proximate cause - the schools they went to are garbage.
The fact that those schools continually get a pass on this is real systemic racism - perpetuated by politicians and education administrations and teacher’s unions who would rather protect the jobs of lousy teachers than educate minority children properly.
In Canada, parents can choose which school fheir kids go to, and a really terrible school will soon have no students and will be shut down. Edmonton closed several inner-city schools because parents chose not to send their kids there. When schools are subject to that kind of pressure, they work harder to keep their standards up. When they have a monopoly on a geographic area full of people with no political power, not so much.
Totally agree. Numeracy doean’t just mean the ability to manipulate symbols. It also means having a general intuitiveness about numbers such that you can underatand the news, know when you are being bullshitted in a story, etc.
If you see a headline that says, “Ten million children die of starvation every day”, you shouldn’t have to do the math to realize that’s a ridiculous number. You should be able to grasp without working it out formally that the statistic would mean billions of children would be dying every year, and that’s impossible.
If you can’t get that a a million dollars divided by a million people is a dollar per person without pencil and paper, you are innumerate.