This weblog entry is part of a continuing paragraph by paragraph critique of Jay Greene’s essay about myths in education.

The introduction is here.

Jay Greene’s “Education Myths,” paragraph 15
The teacher pay myth (continued)

It has been well documented that the people drawn into teaching these days tend to be those who have performed least well in college. If teachers are paid about as well as employees in many other good professions, why aren’t more high performers taking it up? One suspects that high-performing graduates tend to stay away from teaching because the field’s rigid seniority-based structure doesn’t allow them to rise faster and earn more money through better performance or by voluntarily putting in longer hours. In any case, it’s clear that the primary obstacle to attracting better teachers isn’t simply raising pay.

Before I address the claim that teachers are the dregs of academia, I want to point out that Greene is contradicting himself when it comes to teacher hours and compensation.

Greene has spent several paragraphs explaining how teachers are on the gravy train – working fewer hours than other professions and being overcompensated for that labor. If you get in the right district, according to Greene, you can make the equivalent of a 6 digit income working 37 hours a week (without putting in overtime).

Now he claims that people stay away from teaching because it doesn’t matter if you’re lazy or hard working, you get paid the same. High achievers do not go into education because working hard will not be rewarded. This opinion, besides being pulled out of thin air, doesn’t make sense. It seems to me that if a person was guaranteed a high income, short days, and 3 months vacation he or she would take the job. People who get into education with this delusion don’t last long. As stated in a previous part of this series, almost half of beginning teachers leave the profession by their fifth year. [1]

Greene’s first sentence is quite condemning as he implies all teachers come from the bottom of the academic barrel, but gives no reference. Because it is impossible to refute or accept an unnamed source, I have to guess at what he means. I am going to assume he is referring to the often spouted fact that teachers’ college entrance examination (CEE) scores are below most other college graduates. The short story is, yes, students going into teaching, on the average, do have lower CEE scores than those going into other professions (see details at bottom of this post), but, as usual the whole story isn’t as simple as that single fact. [2]

Greene and those who want to use CEEs and other such standardized tests to classify people as deserving or undeserving of entrance into a college don’t like to look too closely at the research that tells us standardized tests, although useful for some purposes, are poor predictors of college and life success. Laini Gainier, Bennett Boskey, Professor of Law at Harvard University who, in 1998, became the first black woman to be tenured at the law school, addresses this issue in an interview by Rebecca Parrish in Dollars & Sense magazine:

Harvard University did a study based on thirty Harvard graduates over a thirty-year period. They wanted to know which students were most likely to exemplify the things that Harvard values most: doing well financially, having a satisfying career and contributing to society (especially in the form of donating to Harvard). The two variables that most predicted which students would achieve these criteria were low SAT scores and a blue-collar background.That study was followed by one at the University of Michigan Law School that found that those most likely to do well financially, maintain a satisfying career, and contribute to society, were black and Latino students who were admitted pursuant to Affirmative Action. Conversely, those with the highest LSAT scores were the least likely to mentor younger attorneys, do pro-bono work, sit on community boards, etc.

So, the use of these so called “measures of merit” like standardized tests is backfiring on our institutions of higher learning and blocking the road to a more democratic society. [3]

Standardized tests have severe limits on what they can tell us, yet there is a group of society that wants us to believe these tests can accurately predict the performance of the test takers. The use of these tests is a political and economic choice, not an educational one. [4]

Now let’s look at grade point average (GPA), a better measure of academic success, by definition, than CEEs. Of those students graduating and becoming teachers in the 1990s, 40% had a 3.75 or higher GPA (both cumulative and in their majors), where 32% had GPAs lower than 2.75. [5] As with most issues involving numerous variables, there are complex subtleties that lie behind all of these numbers.

As has traditionally been true, however, men were less inclined than women to teach, and although men were more likely than women to score in the top quartile of college entrance examination scores, they were less likely to have cumulative GPAs of 3.5 or higher (McCormick, Horn, and Knepper 1996). Therefore, gender differences in teaching may at least partly explain the divergent CEE and GPA findings.

Consistent with such a hypothesis, secondary-level teachers, who are more likely than elementary-level teachers to be men, were also more likely than elementary-level teachers to have scored in the top quartile of the CEE score distribution and were as likely as all graduates to have scored in the top quartile. Secondary teachers were less likely than elementary teachers to have top GPAs, overall and in their majors. [6]

What is very clear from the numbers is that teaching attracts a mixed group of people, and to judge teachers’ academic fitness by one measure is inappropriate.

On a final note, with a bit of tongue in cheek, the University of Michigan Law School study quoted by Geinier found that high scoring LSAT college graduates were less likey to give to their communities (pro bono work, sitting on boards). Teaching is a profession where giving back to the community is required so perhaps scoring a little lower on CEEs is desirable. Especially when G.P.A. and other factors are more important in determining academic success.

The research on the LSAT may, or may not, apply to other CEEs, another study would have to be completed to determine this. Also, there are many people who score high on the LSAT and other CEEs who give to their communities. After all, about 10% of perspective teachers come from the highest fifth of SAT scores. [7]

Notes and References:

1. Staff. 2003. Where We Stand: Teacher Quality. American Federation of Teachers. p. 18. Download pdf (478 K).
2. Staff. April 2002. Teacher Quality and Changes in Initial Teacher Training. Science and Engineering Indicators 2002. National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Statistics, Arlington, VA. See the note below for a detailed quote.
3. Parrish, Rebecca. 2006. The Meritocracy Myth: A Dollars & Sense interview with Lani Guinier. Dollars & Sense, Boston, MA.
4. For more on how standardized testing is used by the American Meritocracy read: Lemann, Nicholas. 2000. The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
5. Henke, Robin R. and Xianglei Chen, Sonya Geis, Paula Knepper. 1997. Progress Through the Teacher Pipeline: 1992-93 College Graduates and Elementary/Secondary School Teaching as of 1997. Education Statistics Quarterly, Vol 2, Issue 1. National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, D.C.
6. Ibid.
7. Berliner, David C. and Bruce J. Biddle. 1995. The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass. p. 105.

Here’s a section that gives the details of my statement (from source [2] above).

…ETS concluded that elementary education candidates, the largest single group of prospective teachers, have much lower math and verbal scores than other college graduates. The pattern in other content areas for teacher candidates was less consistent, however. The average math SAT score for those passing the Praxis II exam and seeking licensure in physical education, special education, art and music, social studies, English, or foreign language was lower than the average math score for all college graduates. Those seeking to teach science and math, however, had higher average math scores than other college graduates. The average verbal SAT scores of those seeking to teach some subjects were more encouraging. The scores of mathematics, social studies, foreign language, science, and English candidates who passed the Praxis II exam were as high as or higher than the average verbal SAT score for all college graduates. Physical education, special education, and art and music teachers scored below the average.