Opinion of the average American public school teacher

[Marokai Backbeat]

What in the world about that post made you think I meant to say that? All I meant by that was that A) It doesn't take an Ivy League education to be a good teacher and that B) Requiring that for all teachers would, even if for the sake of argument it produced an elite squad of Super Teachers, would more than likely just lead to horrible teacher shortages. You can't just require that all the teachers, or even most of the teachers in this country have an education of that caliber and cost, the country is just too large. It's not practical.

I get that the notion of putting teachers through their paces is a very romantic one, but you're not going to staff a high school in Mississippi like that. Despite the fact that I'm as guilty as anyone else as looking to what other countries are doing and saying "Can we find a way to adapt this to America?" this is one of those situations where that just isn't going to work. Setting extremely high standards for teachers in Finland may work out for them, but they're much smaller geographically and have a population half the size of Ohio.

All I meant to say here is that the problem is incredibly complicated, and much of what TNF has said here is dead on. Poverty has to be tackled, parents have to be involved, you have to get everyone invested in the public education system instead of finding ways for the privileged to work outside of it, you have to pay teachers more, you have to focus more on getting proper resources for school workers and better buildings for run-down schools that still very much exist out there, and on and on and on. You can't just say "Teachers, go get a degree from Princeton and you'll suddenly turn everything you touch into a 4.0 GPA." or kick around teachers unions.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Better people than krazen.

So they're better than some guy on a random internet forum? Thanks.

[opebo]

It hasn't escaped my attention that you never mentioned my suggestion in requiring that all prospective teachers have at least a master's in Education from an Ivy League college/university.  A bachelor's will never cut it.  Nothing will begin to improve unless we start demanding better quality teachers.  We should never allow just anyone to teach future generations

Um, you do realize that there aren't enough of this category of people to fill 1% of the need for teachers, don't you? (not to mention that you'd have to pay triple the current salaries to attract someone like that)  You're quite disconnected from reality.

[Indy Texas]

It hasn't escaped my attention that you never mentioned my suggestion in requiring that all prospective teachers have at least a master's in Education from an Ivy League college/university.  A bachelor's will never cut it.  Nothing will begin to improve unless we start demanding better quality teachers.  We should never allow just anyone to teach future generations

Um, you do realize that there aren't enough of this category of people to fill 1% of the need for teachers, don't you? (not to mention that you'd have to pay triple the current salaries to attract someone like that)  You're quite disconnected from reality.

You know someone has truly gone off the reservation when what they've said is so absurd that I am agreeing with Opebo in criticizing it.

There are literally not enough slots in education master's programs at Ivy League schools to satisfy the number of teaching positions in America. This isn't something you should have to look up. A reasonably educated guess using your better judgment would tell you that.

There are roughly 74 million Americans under age 18. Doing very scratch arithmetic and assuming all of these people are in school and you need one teacher for every 30 students, and you need about 2.5 million teachers. That's assuming pretty large class sizes and we're not even broaching the issue of administration, specialty instructors, or learning disability accommodations.

Comparing doctors to teachers isn't helpful. Most doctors see a patient for 5 or 10 minutes. They can treat a lot of patients. Teachers have to be with their students 5 days a week for 9 months a year. They can't teach as many students as doctors can treat patients.