Teacher Preparation and Licensure: "EDUCATOR QUALITY TAKES ANOTHER SLAM: ABYSMAL GRE SCORES ACROSS THE BOARD"

National Council on Teacher Quality:

A letter to the editor in today's Wall Street Journal brings more attention to the low academic performance of the average teacher with more meaningful data than just how well (or poorly) aspiring teachers perform on the SAT. On the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) which many teachers take before entering a Master's program, we find the best evidence to date of substandard performance for the nation's educators.

While the letter cited older data, more recent data from the ETS site tells a sorrowful tale. With the notable exception of secondary school teachers, the large majority of teachers score at the bottom. Out of the 50 intended graduate majors ETS collected data on, seven of the lowest scoring 10 majors on the list are education fields. Only one field--social work--scored lower.

The most popular choice of graduate degrees for teachers with aspirations for school or district leadership is a degree in education administration. The average GRE score was 948, comparing poorly with the national average score of 1058 for all fields of study.

Tom Shuford:

"When public officials want to reduce crime," says Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, "they listen to police officers. When they want to control flooding, they talk to engineers. . . ." (Letters, July 16). Implication: Want to improve education? Talk to the teachers union. A laughable proposition. Digest these data: Applicants for graduate study in education administration -- tested between July 1, 2001, and June 30, 2004 -- had a combined mean total GRE (Graduate Record Examination) score of 950 (Verbal, 427; Math, 523). That is sixth from the bottom of 51 fields of graduate study tabulated by the Educational Testing Service.

The mean total GRE score across all fields was 1066. Which applicants had still lower total GRE scores than applicants in education administration? Social work, 896; early childhood, 913; student counseling, 928; home economics, 933; special education, 934 --
education fields all. Other fields with mean GRE scores on the far left side of the GRE bell curve? Seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th from the left tip of the curve, respectively: public administration ("practices and roles of public bureaucracies"), 965; other education, 968; elementary education, 970; education evaluation and research, 985; other social science, 993. Note the pattern: Eighty-plus percent on the far-left-side-of-the-GRE-bell-curve are headed for -- or, more likely, already employed by -- public education systems. Ninety-plus percent are headed for some form of government employment. This GRE snapshot of the capabilities of the people who run government schooling monopolies is not unrelievedly bleak: There is one education "outlier," secondary education, that has a mean score of 1063, in the middle of the bell curve distribution.
Tom Shuford
Lenoir, N.C.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at July 28, 2007 12:00 AM
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