Education schools teach students little of value, and as a result, people with a degree in something else teach just as well as people with a degree in education. “Massachusetts began temporarily letting anyone with a bachelor’s degree teach…their students saw about the same rate of growth in math & reading as children taught by regularly licensed educators,” notes math professor Anna Stokke, quoting from a news article. “Our teacher training is so bad that randos do as well as trained teachers,” notes economics journalist Noah Smith.
Below is an excerpt from the news article about this (from the education news web site 74Million.Org):
When K-12 schools closed their doors for in-person instruction in spring 2020…It also shut off the training opportunities for future educators.
In response, states instituted a variety of short-term waivers allowing candidates to teach without fulfilling their normal requirements. Those policies helped candidates who would have otherwise been prevented from teaching, while aiding school leaders in filling open positions.
Were teachers worse for this lack of training?
New research from Massachusetts and New Jersey suggests maybe not. In both states, teachers who entered the profession without completing the full requirements performed no worse than their normally trained peers.
Starting June 2020, Massachusetts began temporarily letting anyone with a bachelor’s degree teach. According to data compiled by a team of researchers at Boston University, roughly 5,800 individuals received one of these emergency licenses.
Like other first-year teachers, those granted emergency credentials were disproportionately assigned to work with children with disabilities, English learners and low-income students. And, in fact, they had more such children in their classrooms. Even so, their students saw about the same rate of growth in math and reading as children taught by regularly licensed educators. Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors.
When the Boston University team asked principals and administrators why they hired emergency-certified teachers, they reported using them to fill shortage areas, especially in special education.
The teachers working under these licenses also helped diversify the state’s classrooms, as they were about twice as likely as other beginning educators to be Black, Hispanic or Asian.
New Jersey’s waiver policy was similar. Candidates could earn a temporary credential before passing the normal licensure exams or completing a teacher preparation program. The licenses were good for one year, at which point candidates would need to go back, pass the tests and complete their training. Still, researchers Ben Backes and Dan Goldhaber found similar outcomes as in Massachusetts: Teachers without the normal training and testing were at least as effective in reading and math as other novices.
Most teacher training programs don’t actually train people to teach. Instead, they teach people to be woke leftists who understand little about how children learn. As a result, studies find that people who go through teacher training programs are no more effective at teaching than those who never receive such training.
People can learn to teach without having any college degree at all. A recent study of schools in Oakland, California, showed that. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training in a structured literacy program helped students achieve strong early literacy gains, just like fully credentialed teachers.
Teacher Daniel Buck described how useless teacher training programs at education schools can be, at the National Review:
My teacher training featured Black Lives Matter friendship bracelets, lectures on acupuncture and essential oils, acrostic poems as final projects, and a solid grounding in critical race theory. Notably lacking was a robust emphasis on teaching, learning, cognitive science, child psychology, behavior management, curriculum, or any other practicalities of the classroom. They were present but secondary to progressive politics….We assume that prospective teachers go to such programs and learn to, well, teach. Little of the sort happens. The few curricular reviews that do exist suggest that my program is concerningly representative….the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal solicited syllabi from three of the most prestigious schools of education in the country to determine the most assigned readings at each….the syllabi are replete with critical race theory, political activism, and even outright Marxism. Gloria Ladson-Billings topped the list. Notably, she introduced critical race theory into the academic field of education in 1995. She argues that because of racism’s ubiquity, our society “requires sweeping changes,” and so “liberalism has no mechanism for such a change.” Where the essay actually addresses education — and it does so sparsely — she calls existing school curricula a “culturally specific artifact designed to maintain a white supremacist master script.”
Another common name, Paulo Freire, set the groundwork for an influential approach to education called “critical pedagogy,” which envisions the classroom as a place of advocacy and revolutionary change, not instruction or learning. His seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is an attempt to map the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy onto the student-teacher relationship. He criticizes schooling that emphasizes knowledge transmission and cites the Russian and Maoist cultural revolutions as models of his thought in action. Name after name declares a radical bent at these schools. Jean Anyon wrote Marx and Education. Carlos Alberto Torres co-founded the Paulo Freire Institute. Throughout the curricula are explicit references to Marxism, critical pedagogy, radical feminism, and other fringe political stances.
Thought that would be considered extremist among the broader American populace forms the ideological foundations of these schools. Even the so-called moderates on the lists such as John Dewey advance a theory of Romantic education, an approach that centers the child’s own interests and self-directed learning….Another paper by David Steiner, the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, found a similar state of affairs after reviewing 15 different university teacher-prep programs — a mixture of both elite and non-elite campuses. Radicals such as Freire and romantics such as Dewey dominate the curricula….few programs asked their teachers to demonstrate competence on the methods of reading instruction, going so far as to call most of the syllabi “intellectually barren.” It is, he concludes, a “serious effort to shape the fundamental worldview of future teachers,” not an effort to form effective teachers….
Ultimately, students and teachers both bear the consequences of our teacher-prep failings. In my first year of teaching, having not learned the skills, my students learned little and my classroom was chaotic. Research confirms that teachers who go through established teacher-prep programs or none at all show little long-term difference in efficacy — unsurprising considering the political nature of these institutions. While I want to stymie the flow of politics into our classrooms, the real fallout of our woke-ified teacher-prep programs is simply mediocrity. Teachers who can’t teach create students who don’t learn.
