Are education courses considered the "laughing stock" of academia?

Some excerpts from "Inside American Education" by Thomas Sowell:

Consistently, for decades, those college students who have majored in education have been among the least qualified of all college students, and the professors who taught them have been among the least respected by their colleagues elsewhere in the college or university.

When the president of Harvard University retired in 1933, he told the institution’s overseers that Harvard’s Graduate School of Education was a “kitten that ought to be drowned.” More recently, a knowledgeable academic declared, “the educationists have set the lowest possible standards and require the least amount of hard work.”

Education schools and education departments have been called “the intellectual slums” of the university.

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Hard data on education student qualifications have consistently shown their mental test scores to be at or near the bottom among all categories of students. This was as true of studies done in the 1920s and 1930s as of studies in the 1980s.

Whether measured by Scholastic Aptitude Tests, ACT tests, vocabulary tests, reading comprehension tests, or Graduate Record Examinations, students majoring in education have consistently scored below the national average.

When the U.S. Army had college students tested in 1951 for draft deferments during the Korean War, more than half the students passed in the humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences and mathematics, but only 27 percent of those majoring in education passed.

In short, educators are drawing disproportionately from the dregs of the college-educated population. As William H. Whyte said back in the 1950s, “the facts are too critical for euphemism.

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Given low-quality students and low-quality professors, it can hardly be surprising to discover, as Mayer did, that “most education courses are not intellectually respectable, because their teachers and the textbooks are not intellectually respectable.” In short, some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors in the lowest quality courses supply most American public school teachers.

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Among high school seniors, only 7 percent of those with SAT scores in the top 20 percent, and 13 percent of those in the next quintile, expressed a desire to go into teaching, while nearly half of those in the bottom 40 percent chose teaching.

Moreover, with the passage of time, completion of a college education, and actual work in a teaching career, attrition is far higher in the top ability groups—85 percent of those in the top 20 percent leave teaching after relatively brief careers—while low-ability people tend to remain teachers.

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Sometimes the more able people simply leave for greener pastures, but the greater seniority of the least able can also force schools to lay off the newer and better teachers whenever jobs are reduced.

The dry statistics of these studies translate into a painful human reality captured by a parent’s letter:

Over the years, as a parent, I have repeatedly felt frustrated, angry and helpless when each spring teachers—who were the ones the students hoped anxiously to get, who had students visiting their classrooms after school, who had lively looking classrooms—would receive their lay-off notices. Meanwhile, left behind to teach our children, would be the mediocre teachers who appeared to have precious little creative inspiration for teaching and very little interest in children.

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As for the value of education courses and degrees in the actual teaching of school children, there is no persuasive evidence that such studies have any pay-off whatever in the classroom. Postgraduate degree holders became much more common among teachers during the period of declining student test scores.

Back in the early 1960s, when student SAT scores peaked, fewer than one-fourth of all public school teachers had postgraduate degrees and almost 15 percent lacked even a Bachelor’s degree. But by 1981, when the test score decline hit bottom, just over half of all teachers had Master’s degrees and less than one percent lacked a Bachelor’s.

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Submitted October 02, 2023 at 02:14AM by Dependent_Wafer3866 https://ift.tt/tWvCYuh