Testing Teachers!?... Great Idea

An article in today's Republican (Found here: , it has been discovered that state education officials will be Seeking to boost student achievement in mathematics by focusing on how well prepared teachers are to teach what they're supposed to be teaching.

This makes me melt with joy. I really mean that.

The simple fact of the matter is that a large part of the education crisis in this country is due to the fact that those teaching and preparing our best and brightest are, well, anything but bright. It is a lot to expect the teachers themselves to teach what they do not know or understand. Tests have repeatedly shown, for decades on end, that college students who go into teaching score at or near the bottom among students in a wide variety of fields. No wonder teachers hate tests so much! And no wonder that they find innumerable fads more attractive than teaching solid skills, which they themselves may not have mastered.

For decades, our children have been incredibly outperformed in math, with American children almost ending up at or near the bottom when compared with children in other countries, DESPITE spending just as much time in the class room as students in foreign countries. Somehow, someway, this has yet to convince 'edgekaters' that they're doing anything wrong of course.

When asked the question; what is more important in math, that children 'know the right answers to the questions' or that they 'struggle with the process' of trying to find the right answer, 86% of these fools answered 'struggling' over knowing the answer according to a recent study. Good grief, Charlie Brown.

Learning match, like learning every other subject teachers don't bother to teach, is part of a bigger picture. That picture involves children 'discovering' their own knowledge rather than having teachers take things that are, you know, already known and passing them along to our youth. The concept of thinking that children will 'discover' something that took scholars and geniuses decades and generations to 'discover' is truly a faith to me, which passeth all understanding.

If it couldn't get any better, discipline isn't to be bothered with, either. Fewer than half of the professors of 'education majors' felt that discipline was 'absolutely essential' to the educational process. In fact one even wrote down 'when you have students engaged and not vessels to receive information, you tend to have fewer discipline problems'. All the evidence, in all actuality, points to the exact opposite, but who needs evidence when you've got a golden calf? We need more "teaching to the test" and "Testing to Teachers" so that these truly ridiculous dogmas can be subjected to evidence.

A good teacher is someone who stirs up from within us an internal curiosity. They make us eager to read books. They get us to try new things and prepare us for wanting to learn more and more. In order to be this type of teacher one needs to have that same fire, expertise and passion for whatever their intellectual pursuit may be. Sadly these days, that's not so much the case. Never mind the fact that teacher's don't merely 'know' their subjects. They don't care to learn them at all.

A new survey of education majors at American Universities paints a dismal picture, indeed. College students who are training to become teachers have little interest in, well, learning much of anything.

The Foundation for Academic Standards and Tradition, which is a nonprofit student advocacy organization with members all over the political and ideological spectrum are expressing great concern over the results. Here are just two sobering realities:

--49 percent of the 1,005 education majors surveyed had read no book, or only one book, that was not actually required in their courses.

--Barely a majority, 55 percent, regarded a liberal arts education as better than an education in a trade, and 60 percent think there's too much emphasis on the study of great books.

Apparently, these are the folks who're educating the next generation of Americans, but it's most definitely not clear how that's going to happen. "K-12 education was a top priority for most Americans this election year,'' says pollster John Zogby, who was one of the fine folks whom conducted the survey. "This survey revealed some compelling data about the nation's education majors.''

That's an understatement. In all reality, not all education majors are going to be horrible teachers, but let's face it, one needs to question the sanity of someone who chooses to major in 'education' when the idea of an 'Education Major' is oxymoronic unto itself.

However, what should be most disturbing to all of us, is that this group of education majors is so clueless as to their own ignorance that they've implicated themselves via their own shortcomings, not having any clue as to what they're doing. They're not only products of our now fully retarded Education system, but they fail to see, in any way, that they're contributing to more retardation. They're ignorant of their own ignorance.

What would posses someone to want to be a teacher if they aren't interested in LEARNING?

The public schools recruit from the education majors and private schools are more likely to draw on teachers with a greater depth of knowledge, because, well, they TEST their incoming teachers to determine their competence. That's certainly one reason that there exists a growing number of parents who're supporting school choice. In essence, school choice IS the school reform of choice. I'm willing to bet most who vote against school choice wouldn't ever send their kids to public school. After all, they wouldn't want your kids touching theirs! Who knows where they've been!

In the end, finding out why stupid people try to become exactly what they shouldn't ever be considered for is a problem that will take much studying. However, testing teachers in core competencies is at least a massive step in the right direction towards making sure our kids don't end up wearing helmets to work and eating their own boogers for the rest of their lives. Test those teachers!