educationrealist comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong

65 Post author: ThinkOfTheChildren 08 April 2013 09:29PM

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Comment author: Michelle_Z 10 April 2013 07:02:38PM 1 point [-]

How, exactly is it, that these people get hired in the first place?

Comment author: gwern 10 April 2013 07:20:34PM 10 points [-]

I'll put it this way: in the average GRE scores by intended field, education ranks below philosophy & STEM in every subtest, and various forms of education rank very low (early childhood education is, out of 50 groups, second from the bottom in 2 subtests and fifth from the bottom in the last subtest).

Comment author: educationrealist 11 April 2013 06:37:54AM 3 points [-]

Average GRE is useless. Elementary teachers have far lower GRE scores than secondary school teachers, and are about average in verbal and below average in math. Secondary school content teachers are above average in verbal and average in math. However, close to half of all secondary school teachers get higher than 600 on the math section, which is more than the number of math and science teachers. While I suppose it's possible that math and science teachers have terrible math scores and the English/history teachers are scoring those 600+ scores, I'm figuring it's far more likely that math and science high school teachers have eminently respectable GRE scores in math, and that English/history teachers have higher than average verbal.

Anyone who claims that teachers are stupid is using propaganda instead of ETS data.

<A href="http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/teacher-quality-pseudofacts-part-ii/">Cite for SAT scores</a> and for <a href="http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/teacher-quality-pseudofacts/">GRE scores</a>

Comment author: glenra 11 April 2013 06:02:32PM 3 points [-]

What makes "higher than 600 on ONE section" a cutoff above which counts as an "eminently respectable" score?

Anyone who claims that teachers are stupid is using propaganda instead of ETS data.

Would you accept "mediocre"? ;-)