I am very close to obtaining an elementary school teaching degree (46 of 49 credits completed), and as of this year I am a full time teacher at a private school (which doesn't have to care whether I officially have a license). My masters program is considered among the best in the state.
Unfortunately, I don't have many good things to say about my masters program. The majority of my classes have been interesting but useless in a real classroom. Teaching is just one of those things that you largely learn by doing.
Teaching does take a lot of skill and practice—I am surrounded at work by more experienced colleagues, and watching them always leaves me impressed—but I don't think it's something you can learn from a textbook.
Similarly, the licensure exams are just awful, at least in New York. I will leave you with a real practice test question from the official preparation materials. This is for the content knowledge test on "Science and Technology".
----------
A construction company is evaluating proposals for the creation of a new playground. They are using the following scale to assess the relevant criteria:
+--------------+------------------------+
| Scale number | Scale score assessment |
+--------------+------------------------+
| 1 | Far below standards |
| 2 | Below Standard |
| 3 | Meeting standard |
| 4 | Exceeding standard |
+--------------+------------------------+
Use the chart below to answer the question that follows:
According to the evaluation detailed in the chart, which company should be awarded the project?
----------
Ready for the answer? Take a moment to think about it before looking...
The answer key says it's company four, because they have "the highest overall score. We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score."
This answer made me unreasonably angry. Apparently to become a teacher in New York, you're not allowed to use your brain. "We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score." means exactly the following when you're talking about a playground: "Congratulations, all the kids love this creative, high quality playground! Unfortunately they're all at the hospital."
I agree with another commenter, you should name and shame, this is beyond stupid and deserves to be called out as the idiocy it is.
All of the federal "can you walk and chew gum" hiring tests are booby-trapped like this. The highest tier of scores go to the people who follow instructions literally and without regard to context, and who never apply their own moral judgment.
In the above example the last company is clearly sacrificing lives to get work done.
> "Congratulations, all the kids love this creative, high quality playground! Unfortunately they're all at the hospital."
The company even optimised the number of children who can experience it! A child in the hospital is one who got to use the playground, _and_ one who isn't hogging it, stopping others from experiencing it.
I dont think standard usually means codified. It is also frequently used to mean typical, or within expectation.
It this example, outside law or regulation on standard creativity and utility seem pretty unlikely.
There is also a pretty big difference between standard (singular) and standards (plural), where the latter is more likely to imply a set of minimum requirements.
The correct answer is obviously "insufficient information"
Maybe company 4 is the best, but I don't see why no information on weights implies equal weights.
Edit:
After thinking about this phenomenon for a while, I think there is an argument for testing implied or unstated prompts.
It is frustrating to have to read minds, and quess what expectations are in different contexts. However, building a mental models of other people is an important skill.
I dont know that I would want to hire someone entirely incapable of it, who routinely required complete and explicit instruction.
That said, I dont think this kind of cognitive test is what they were going for
> We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score.
This is extra hilarious because, if you don’t know the weighting (or even that each score is linear), then adding the scores in the first place is an invalid operation.
Company 4 is a reasonable answer. What's the point in having a scoring system if you're going to use personal judgement to determine the winner? Of course company 4 would be a bad fit. But the problem is the method that was originally chosen to evaluate the companies. The key is "according to the evaluation detailed in the chart". In reality, the company should look at these results and realize that they need a new evaluation method.
Is that a choice question? Or does it require a subjective answer? If it's the latter, then the question is reasonable to some degree, I guess?
“Company 4 might be the best in terms of naive computer-calculated average, but anything that doesn't meet a particular standard generally should not be allowed by law to be used/built. So Company 1 is the only choice, and perhaps the best, subjectively.”
I think this is a good question for discussion, because a child might answer “Company 4” at first just by looking at it and averaging it as anyone without any context would, but then you could say something more about it. But, I don't think it was intended to be analysed or answered this way. Either way, dumb question to ask for a qualification exam IMO.
The source is copyrighted / costs money. Also, I did purposefully choose the worst question as an example.
Practice tests can be purchased from this site https://www.nystce.nesinc.com but I can't find the page for this specific test (and don't really want to spend time looking). You're looking for the practice test for CST 245. This is the Arts & Sciences section of the Multi-Subject test for Teachers of Childhood, Grade 1 - Grade 6.
Seems about right for "Science and Technology", a variant of this question also shows up in German IHK (chamber of commerce) exams for software developer certifications, with a similar expected answer.
Although you do sometimes get weights… the important part is explaining that you evaluate some weighted sum and take the best result.
How much impact would this question have on the final result for the licensure exam?
IIRC during my own IHK examination this was worth around 5pp, which is almost enough to drop you an entire grade.
> How much impact would this question have on the final result for the licensure exam?
Fun fact: I have no idea!
Basically all I know is that (1) tests are scored on a scale from 400 – 600, (2) the minimum passing score is 520, and (3) the test is not graded on a curve. But I don't know why they even bother sharing these numbers, because they don't divulge any information on how they're calculated.
What’s the point of a question like this? Somewhere someone will have written down something they want teachers to be able to do and that will have been translated into a question like this. Was the original requirement bad or the translation into the question? What kind of system would lead to a better question?
As a former high school teacher, I am in favor of reduced requirements to enter the profession; however, I taught in two states that supported these types of on ramps, and they didn’t seem to make a notable impact on applicant numbers (that is, out of the hundreds of educators I worked with over the years, I knew only one who came in via a non-traditional pathway after working in a different field (engineering)).
That’s not the question the article is asking, but I’m skeptical that making it easier for professionals to career switch into teaching is going to cause any meaningful number of them to do so.
Teacher pay is too low for anyone to want to take a teaching job when they have professional qualifications that would allow them to work a much better-paid job. (Especially when getting those skills also involved paying hundreds of thousands in student loans to a university. You need to earn your way out of that hole, and not working the best-paying job you can would be prolonging that debt!)
But I think the article is suggesting something different: that teachers could and should be hired fresh out of high school, when they don’t yet have any of those other professional skills — or the debt involved in acquiring them — and then simply given on-the-job training. Quote:
> Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers.
How much approximately do you think a teacher gets paid? Obviously it depends on specifics so maybe say whether you’re imagining a city centre / suburban / rural school, and whether the state/district is wealthy and whether it’s a high school or whatever.
I have some guesses in my head for something like ‘high school teacher in moderately wealthy Chicago suburb’ (I haven’t written the number here because I don’t want to anchor you) though I don’t have a great sense for how many jobs like that there are in the US. Above base pay there can also be more for helping with extracurriculars, potentially a defined benefit pension, and after settling in teachers will have a lot of free time/vacation not spent planning lessons. The amount of pay may not excite you if you’re a professional software developer at a well-paying company in the US, but I’m not sure that a more typical professional job would be “much better-paid”.
I was taking time off in 2022 when my daughter's high school CS teacher quit (to take a job at Microsoft).
I volunteered to step in until they could find a qualified replacement. It ended up working out, but it was a pretty big problem to have an unlicensed teacher in the school. They ultimately had me enroll as a substitute who just happened to get assigned to the same classes every day, but they said if I wanted to come back the following year I'd need to become officially licensed.
I could see myself teaching high school in retirement. Helps the community, keeps you busy, and your summers are open. But not if I have to jump through a bunch of make-work hoops for the privilege of helping out.
> I could see myself teaching high school in retirement.
My calc & discrete math teacher in HS was a retired guy from bell labs, apparently knew claude shannon. He had made a bunch of money doing that and was just teaching at the HS as a philanthropic service in old age. He wrote & printed the textbooks we used. Practically every other teacher seemed inadequate afterwards. Oddly enough I had a professor in college who was from bell labs too, absolutely brilliant too and taught in the same, in some way brutal, style too.
I would love to teach high school but there would need to be some major changes to the system before I would be willing to.
What I really want is to be able to teach the kind of CS courses that I took in high school—they were optional classes that kids chose to be in because they were interested, and the teacher had full discretion on what to teach.
Unfortunately, that's not the typical high school class, and most teachers have to teach at least a few mandatory classes with curricula dictated at the state level. Props to the teachers who are willing to deal with reluctant students and enabling parents, but I would go crazy in that environment, and I've had bad experiences trying to teach curricula handed down from on high.
It may not make any significant change in the numbers applying for k-12 positions, but do people really need to go through the torture, indoctrination, and expense of graduate school to teach k-12? Won't a handful of undergrad courses, seminars, and internships suffice in addition to whatever other degree is pursued? As it is now wannabe teachers already have too much time, the most precious of all commodities, invested in ramping up to teaching.
Maybe not significant numbers, but my wife and I have both thought about switching (along with a move to a lower COL area) as an exit ramp from the corporate rat race.
I have a BA in economics and a 20+ year career in software. As best we can tell, in order to teach middle or high school in VA (I’d want to teach CS/IT) I need to obtain a Masters in Education to do so. Spending $30k+ on a post-graduate degree for a career with starting pay 1/4 of my current income doesn’t make any sense.
If there was an on-job path to certification it would be viable. But the expense of taking a year off work to get a Masters pretty well kills it.
I did an online masters in teaching while working full time for less than $6K. When figuring out costs be sure to remember that you pay tuition for your observations and student teaching as well as your regular class time. Those add up to 4-5 months of full time unpaid work in a classroom.
Reminder to everyone commenting here: you are not an average student. The hard part of teaching is not coming up with dynamite lessons for kids who are smart and want to learn and are capable of doing so and aren’t hungry. Anyone can do that. Well, almost anyone.
Way back in the olden times, 5 to 10% of people went to school, and it worked really well for them. Now everyone goes to school, and it works really well for about 5% of us.
I promise you, this site is not as special as you think it is.
The majority of people here are incredibly average (like me!), just fortunate to be born at the right time, be exposed to technology at the right time, get a few other lucky breaks, and of course put some work in.
It’s super easy to convince yourself that because you’re successful you must be special. Remember that people tend to ascribe their successes to themselves and their failures to someone else.
You would be average if you actually thought this site doesn't have a selection bias out of the world population. If you think HN averages out to a middle of the pack student, people who spend their free time reading text, you have quite the social bubble around you. There's also like 25 $1b+ founder/ceo's out of 50k.
Even if you believe you have average intelligence, it's without doubt that there are many more students in school with lower motivation. To the point that getting them to write a paragraph is like pulling teeth. The difference between the students in the AP classes when I was in high school and the students in the A or B level classes was night and day in terms of just paying attention or being able to give any answer to a question.
There's only so much you can do to make a subject interesting when the students care so little about their education. It starts at a young age and just compounds. By the time you see them as students in high school, they're already years behind in motivation and education.
Makes sense to me. I attended public school all my life. Everyone I knew more or less had the same out look on formal education, means to an end, can I just get the spark notes, thanks.
In college I interacted with a strange life form called a "homeschooler". Almost without exception they were smarter, better read, and had a desire to learn. Educating children seems to be far more than degrees, licenses, and CE credits.
I am a home educating parent. There is no way I could teach a classroom without learning how. Teaching one to one, encouraging and mentoring does not need as much skill. Most of us do it somewhere (e.g. at work). On the other hand I am sure the skill can be learned on the job, but teaching a classroom is still definitely difficult.
I also did not spend much time teaching as such: when they were young, lots of learning through play (even things like learning to read can be turned into games) and as they got older they taught them selves more. We have used tutors a bit for exams (GCSEs - British exams taken at 16 in schools though my kids sat most younger) but even then very little (two to three hours a week at most, and even that for just one year).
Home educating is a lot more flexible so kids can follow their interests. You can do a vast range of subjects (my younger daughter did Astronomy GCSE and is doing Latin, did Physics but not Biology). That combined with the study skills and self-discipline from teaching themselves more leaves them more motivated and better prepared for further study (and work too).
It may depend. I was mainly educated in the UK. I went to council schools in poor areas, and to an expensive public school, and the difference between pupil behaviour was enormous. In the former they were hard to control (I even remember a kid angrily telling a teacher to fuck off) but in the former when the teacher started speaking everybody piped down and started listening immediately. I remember being so struck by that the first time I saw it. I guess a class of willing students is going to be a whole lot easier to teach than a roomful of ragamuffins who would rather be outside playing footie.
all the best teachers I had in public school were people who got into teaching after having an actual career because they had actually lived in the real world. Most of the "teaching" is just stuff mandated by the government and taught via lesson plans created by the book companies.
another issue is that teachers get promoted based on years in the system or by getting more useless degrees, rather than on how well they actually teach their students
Can we please not get into the homeschool flame war here again? Every time it comes up it turns into a pointless war of anecdotes, because the data on outcomes simply isn't strong enough for it to be anything else (trust me, I've tried).
I was completely unschooled prior to college and while I did fine in school I was generally very poorly adjusted. I actually don't know a single homeschooled person who came of age nearly as prepared for the world as anyone I know who went to primary school.
Do you have any studies or sources to show outcomes of homeschooled children? I've since met many outside of college, they all seem far better off than the average high schooler I knew as a kid.
The long-term impact is much more ambiguous to measure.
I paid particular attention in school when a teacher would explain why they were trying to teach us something. I noticed the same patterns of teaching among different teachers in the same school system, and how it all worked together to reinforce the skills we needed. (Note: many of my peers experienced the "extra" work as pointless, because they didn't understand the long-term implications).
Teachers who don't understand educational theory can't work as part of an educational system without additional training. In the meantime, their students miss out on long-term skill building.
This situation makes me think of technical debt. A short-term fix with long-term, ambiguous problems that are difficult to unravel.
Good point. In short, I would rephrase it as "if your measurement doesn't show the difference between trained and untrained teachers, maybe your measurement is wrong?"
There 2 other plausible hypothesis that the article ignores:
1. What if untrained teachers are effective because they learn on the job from trained teachers? Which means that you have to have certain % of trained teachers to keep the system alive.
2. What if trained teachers become less effective because they drop their standards looking at how untrained ones work? This is a common phenomenon at workplaces, and I've seen it happen in software development many times.
Most of what I remember involves "transferability" - the ability to take a skill in one area and apply it in a different context. One way to teach this involves combining subjects, such as practicing reading and comprehension skills in math class with word problems.
There is a keyword I am forgetting which would make this comment easier to answer in detail. If I remember it I will post again.
Some additional context from TFA, which is actually pretty insightful.
> One preliminary explanation from the New Jersey study was that the emergency licensed teachers were working in schools that had a record of helping students make strong academic gains. It’s possible that the schools had supports in place, such as teacher coaching, a strong curriculum or something else that compensated for less training... Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory.
> There’s some evidence that teacher licensure tests are mildly accurate predictors of who will be a good educator. All else equal, a school would be better off selecting candidates with a higher test score, especially if they’re going to be teaching math or science. But that general rule would mischaracterize a lot of teachers — some test well but don’t have great classroom management or interpersonal skills, while others may not test well but are effective at working with children.
I'm not an expert, but my impression of modern classrooms is that teachers don't have as much leeway to choose what or how they teach, compared to, say 50 years ago. They have a strictly defined curriculum to get through, and they're generally spending a lot of their classroom hours teaching to standardized tests. Might the difference in "classroom management" skill, which is evidently untested in teacher licensing, be the most significant thing left that can make one teacher better than another? That is, if we make teachers (essentially) read from the same script, maybe it's all in the delivery?
And if this is untested in teacher licensing, maybe it's somewhat evenly distributed between licensed and unlicensed teachers?
Sounds like a good reason to continue the experiment. As long as we continue to insist on paying teachers as little as possible, it makes sense to lower the ridiculous educational requirements just to teach elementary school.
I have a family member who was hired as an Emergency teacher over 20 years ago. They've since become fully credentialed, obtained their masters in education, taught masters students, and organized a particular program/subject at the district level.
Speaking with them, their experience has been the core driver of a successful teacher is primarily whether they want to be there and care about the students success.
Of course, when they were first hired they spent all of their free time crafting lessons plans for a subject they basically failed in high school. Studying the textbook and relevant material so they could teach it.
Readit News
Unfortunately, I don't have many good things to say about my masters program. The majority of my classes have been interesting but useless in a real classroom. Teaching is just one of those things that you largely learn by doing.
Teaching does take a lot of skill and practice—I am surrounded at work by more experienced colleagues, and watching them always leaves me impressed—but I don't think it's something you can learn from a textbook.
Similarly, the licensure exams are just awful, at least in New York. I will leave you with a real practice test question from the official preparation materials. This is for the content knowledge test on "Science and Technology".
----------
A construction company is evaluating proposals for the creation of a new playground. They are using the following scale to assess the relevant criteria:
Use the chart below to answer the question that follows: According to the evaluation detailed in the chart, which company should be awarded the project?----------
Ready for the answer? Take a moment to think about it before looking...
The answer key says it's company four, because they have "the highest overall score. We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score."
I agree with another commenter, you should name and shame, this is beyond stupid and deserves to be called out as the idiocy it is.
You do you want me to name, exactly?
The tests are made by Pearson Education. The website for the certification tests is https://www.nystce.nesinc.com/.
In the above example the last company is clearly sacrificing lives to get work done.
The company even optimised the number of children who can experience it! A child in the hospital is one who got to use the playground, _and_ one who isn't hogging it, stopping others from experiencing it.
I absolutely love this! xD
"standard" usually implies that it's an outside rule from a regulatory body/certification agency that you need to conform to.
It's such a weird question to ask in the first place.
It this example, outside law or regulation on standard creativity and utility seem pretty unlikely.
There is also a pretty big difference between standard (singular) and standards (plural), where the latter is more likely to imply a set of minimum requirements.
Maybe company 4 is the best, but I don't see why no information on weights implies equal weights.
Edit:
After thinking about this phenomenon for a while, I think there is an argument for testing implied or unstated prompts. It is frustrating to have to read minds, and quess what expectations are in different contexts. However, building a mental models of other people is an important skill.
I dont know that I would want to hire someone entirely incapable of it, who routinely required complete and explicit instruction.
That said, I dont think this kind of cognitive test is what they were going for
This is extra hilarious because, if you don’t know the weighting (or even that each score is linear), then adding the scores in the first place is an invalid operation.
“Company 4 might be the best in terms of naive computer-calculated average, but anything that doesn't meet a particular standard generally should not be allowed by law to be used/built. So Company 1 is the only choice, and perhaps the best, subjectively.”
I think this is a good question for discussion, because a child might answer “Company 4” at first just by looking at it and averaging it as anyone without any context would, but then you could say something more about it. But, I don't think it was intended to be analysed or answered this way. Either way, dumb question to ask for a qualification exam IMO.
And this is why we have debacles like the 737max.
Practice tests can be purchased from this site https://www.nystce.nesinc.com but I can't find the page for this specific test (and don't really want to spend time looking). You're looking for the practice test for CST 245. This is the Arts & Sciences section of the Multi-Subject test for Teachers of Childhood, Grade 1 - Grade 6.
Although you do sometimes get weights… the important part is explaining that you evaluate some weighted sum and take the best result.
How much impact would this question have on the final result for the licensure exam?
IIRC during my own IHK examination this was worth around 5pp, which is almost enough to drop you an entire grade.
Fun fact: I have no idea!
Basically all I know is that (1) tests are scored on a scale from 400 – 600, (2) the minimum passing score is 520, and (3) the test is not graded on a curve. But I don't know why they even bother sharing these numbers, because they don't divulge any information on how they're calculated.
https://www.nystce.nesinc.com/content/docs/NYSTCE_ISR_Back_M...
> Although you do sometimes get weights… the important part is explaining that you evaluate some weighted sum and take the best result.
To be clear, this is a multiple choice question. You need to select (A) Company 1, (B) Company 2, (C) Company 3, or (D) Company 4.
Deleted Comment
To filter out people with the capacity and inclination to engage in critical thinking, because those people will not last as teachers.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-t...
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
That’s not the question the article is asking, but I’m skeptical that making it easier for professionals to career switch into teaching is going to cause any meaningful number of them to do so.
But I think the article is suggesting something different: that teachers could and should be hired fresh out of high school, when they don’t yet have any of those other professional skills — or the debt involved in acquiring them — and then simply given on-the-job training. Quote:
> Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers.
I have some guesses in my head for something like ‘high school teacher in moderately wealthy Chicago suburb’ (I haven’t written the number here because I don’t want to anchor you) though I don’t have a great sense for how many jobs like that there are in the US. Above base pay there can also be more for helping with extracurriculars, potentially a defined benefit pension, and after settling in teachers will have a lot of free time/vacation not spent planning lessons. The amount of pay may not excite you if you’re a professional software developer at a well-paying company in the US, but I’m not sure that a more typical professional job would be “much better-paid”.
I volunteered to step in until they could find a qualified replacement. It ended up working out, but it was a pretty big problem to have an unlicensed teacher in the school. They ultimately had me enroll as a substitute who just happened to get assigned to the same classes every day, but they said if I wanted to come back the following year I'd need to become officially licensed.
I could see myself teaching high school in retirement. Helps the community, keeps you busy, and your summers are open. But not if I have to jump through a bunch of make-work hoops for the privilege of helping out.
My calc & discrete math teacher in HS was a retired guy from bell labs, apparently knew claude shannon. He had made a bunch of money doing that and was just teaching at the HS as a philanthropic service in old age. He wrote & printed the textbooks we used. Practically every other teacher seemed inadequate afterwards. Oddly enough I had a professor in college who was from bell labs too, absolutely brilliant too and taught in the same, in some way brutal, style too.
What I really want is to be able to teach the kind of CS courses that I took in high school—they were optional classes that kids chose to be in because they were interested, and the teacher had full discretion on what to teach.
Unfortunately, that's not the typical high school class, and most teachers have to teach at least a few mandatory classes with curricula dictated at the state level. Props to the teachers who are willing to deal with reluctant students and enabling parents, but I would go crazy in that environment, and I've had bad experiences trying to teach curricula handed down from on high.
I have a BA in economics and a 20+ year career in software. As best we can tell, in order to teach middle or high school in VA (I’d want to teach CS/IT) I need to obtain a Masters in Education to do so. Spending $30k+ on a post-graduate degree for a career with starting pay 1/4 of my current income doesn’t make any sense.
If there was an on-job path to certification it would be viable. But the expense of taking a year off work to get a Masters pretty well kills it.
Way back in the olden times, 5 to 10% of people went to school, and it worked really well for them. Now everyone goes to school, and it works really well for about 5% of us.
The majority of people here are incredibly average (like me!), just fortunate to be born at the right time, be exposed to technology at the right time, get a few other lucky breaks, and of course put some work in.
It’s super easy to convince yourself that because you’re successful you must be special. Remember that people tend to ascribe their successes to themselves and their failures to someone else.
There's only so much you can do to make a subject interesting when the students care so little about their education. It starts at a young age and just compounds. By the time you see them as students in high school, they're already years behind in motivation and education.
In college I interacted with a strange life form called a "homeschooler". Almost without exception they were smarter, better read, and had a desire to learn. Educating children seems to be far more than degrees, licenses, and CE credits.
I also did not spend much time teaching as such: when they were young, lots of learning through play (even things like learning to read can be turned into games) and as they got older they taught them selves more. We have used tutors a bit for exams (GCSEs - British exams taken at 16 in schools though my kids sat most younger) but even then very little (two to three hours a week at most, and even that for just one year).
Home educating is a lot more flexible so kids can follow their interests. You can do a vast range of subjects (my younger daughter did Astronomy GCSE and is doing Latin, did Physics but not Biology). That combined with the study skills and self-discipline from teaching themselves more leaves them more motivated and better prepared for further study (and work too).
another issue is that teachers get promoted based on years in the system or by getting more useless degrees, rather than on how well they actually teach their students
Deleted Comment
Though the entire set is probably more useful and practical.
Deleted Comment
I paid particular attention in school when a teacher would explain why they were trying to teach us something. I noticed the same patterns of teaching among different teachers in the same school system, and how it all worked together to reinforce the skills we needed. (Note: many of my peers experienced the "extra" work as pointless, because they didn't understand the long-term implications).
Teachers who don't understand educational theory can't work as part of an educational system without additional training. In the meantime, their students miss out on long-term skill building.
This situation makes me think of technical debt. A short-term fix with long-term, ambiguous problems that are difficult to unravel.
There 2 other plausible hypothesis that the article ignores:
1. What if untrained teachers are effective because they learn on the job from trained teachers? Which means that you have to have certain % of trained teachers to keep the system alive.
2. What if trained teachers become less effective because they drop their standards looking at how untrained ones work? This is a common phenomenon at workplaces, and I've seen it happen in software development many times.
There is a keyword I am forgetting which would make this comment easier to answer in detail. If I remember it I will post again.
> One preliminary explanation from the New Jersey study was that the emergency licensed teachers were working in schools that had a record of helping students make strong academic gains. It’s possible that the schools had supports in place, such as teacher coaching, a strong curriculum or something else that compensated for less training... Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory.
> There’s some evidence that teacher licensure tests are mildly accurate predictors of who will be a good educator. All else equal, a school would be better off selecting candidates with a higher test score, especially if they’re going to be teaching math or science. But that general rule would mischaracterize a lot of teachers — some test well but don’t have great classroom management or interpersonal skills, while others may not test well but are effective at working with children.
I'm not an expert, but my impression of modern classrooms is that teachers don't have as much leeway to choose what or how they teach, compared to, say 50 years ago. They have a strictly defined curriculum to get through, and they're generally spending a lot of their classroom hours teaching to standardized tests. Might the difference in "classroom management" skill, which is evidently untested in teacher licensing, be the most significant thing left that can make one teacher better than another? That is, if we make teachers (essentially) read from the same script, maybe it's all in the delivery?
And if this is untested in teacher licensing, maybe it's somewhat evenly distributed between licensed and unlicensed teachers?
Speaking with them, their experience has been the core driver of a successful teacher is primarily whether they want to be there and care about the students success.
Of course, when they were first hired they spent all of their free time crafting lessons plans for a subject they basically failed in high school. Studying the textbook and relevant material so they could teach it.