Good news/Bad news for teacher quality

We’ve all been asked the foreboding question, “Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news?” To increase the interactivity of this post on the state of our nation’s teacher quality, I’ll say this: Choose your own adventure, read whichever section you would like first: The Good News, The Bad News, or The Conclusion.

The Good News
Teacher qualifications have improved over the past decade

Today’s beginning teachers have better academic credentials than their predecessors did a decade ago, according to USA Today. So what does this really mean? A new study by the ETS (the makers of the Praxis test taken by most new teachers) finds that, in terms of test scores and GPA, teacher candidates qualifications have risen sharply.

Teacher candidates’ verbal SAT scores have risen 13 points, while their math scores have risen 17 points. Candidates who report GPAs of 3.5 or above have risen from 27 percent to 40 percent. Encouragingly, these gains hold strong across gender, racial and ethnic lines.

The Bad News

U.S. middle school teachers are ill-prepared in math

While our teachers may be more qualified than in the past, it seems our middle school teachers take fewer math courses and are less knowledgeable than their counterparts in other countries. These findings come from a study performed by the Michigan State University researcher William Schmidt who compared individuals on the brink of becoming middle school teachers in the U.S., Bulgaria, Germany, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan.

In Schmidt’s study, U.S. teachers scored significantly lower than those in all countries except Mexico on knowledge tests in algebra and functions, which are considered critically important for teaching middle school math. This is especially discouraging because, as many studies have now noted, middle school has been targeted as one of the crucial periods in student math learning.

“Our future teachers are getting weak training mathematically and are just not prepared to teach the demanding mathematics curriculum we need for middle schools if we hope to compete internationally,” Schmidt told EdWeek.

Too true. Poor math preparation and instruction is a cycle. Fortunately, it is one that we can break by mandating more math preparation for our teachers, as Schmidt suggestions.

The Conclusion

We’re doing better in terms of attracting more qualified teacher candidates, but we need to prepare them significantly better in terms of math education.