[Haven_Monahan]

Pretty Much Exactly That.

Of course, you might want to go further, and ask why this hasn't happened. Why wouldn't some state or locality in the US demand that its teacher-training candidates have a BS in, say, nursing (for primary schoolteachers) or engineering (for highschool math and science) plus an appropriate score on an IQ test like the wonderlic (serving as a sanity check on the required credentials)? They would need these before being hired, even if they had a degree in education.

Then, those teachers could demand higher autonomy (and better wages), and school boards would be inclined to go along. Why aren't parents and the school boards they elect willing or able to do this?

One issue is of course that schools of education in the US are not getting the top cohort of high school graduating classes, and they work with what they get. The young woman (and it is almost all young women) gets a degree, a certificate, and gets to be in charge of your kids for six hours a day, even though when she was in your English class in HS she would copy her answers off of the test of your permanently-stoned buddies.

Who wouldn't want watch her like a hawk?

Next...the union. Some teachers can't teach, but they can for damn sure vote, and pay their union dues to the NEA. The NEA isn't actually opposed to education, but anything that diminishes the political clout of its lobby (no matter how justifiable to parents, students, or even its individual members) will be opposed w/ much firmness.

Finally, there are...legal obstacles. Less said about them, the better...but they do exist.

[fsloth]

I'll have inject a remark viz one of your hyopotheses. IQ tests are absolute bollocks - especially if gauging potential ability to teach.

[Haven_Monahan]

Citations, of course.

Or are you simply of the Nicholas Garaufis school of thought; namely, if the test isn't perfect, it can't possibly be used as a hiring tool? After seeing what Judge G did to the FDNY training program, I'd have half a mind to buy extra smoke alarms and fire extinguishers if I lived in the city...

Like a lot of people, I know some persons who would probably be excluded by the general approache I described upthread, and who ended up going into teaching and being really, really good at their specialty. That's why there should always be a way to make exceptions. That doesn't invalidate the principle that "book smart" isn't a bad criteria for new teachers, and that some tests can give a rough idea of how likely someone is to be so.

Cliched but true:

Tough cases make bad law. The plural of anecdote isn't data.

[fsloth]

"Grit" by Angela Duckworth contains excellent examples of the unfair outcomes false negatives cause. She's also published research dealing with this topic:

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/19/7716.abstract

People can get bad scores just because they are really nervous, etc. Now you have a score, that does not display your innate abilities at all, but, it blocks you from several activities you might excel and enjoy.

To inject some qualitative opinions of my own, totally lacking of any refrences:

IQ tests can be used to sieve through populations - with false negatives. Their only utility in career context is as an arbitrary tool to reduce candidate population. The only sane motivation for their use would be a political or economic pressure to restrict number of candidates to make their evaluation and processing cheaper downstream. The downsides are: arbitrary unfair blocking of individual careers, potentially removing candidates that would excel. If the point is to reduce the population, then generally, if the cost function of candidate quality cannot be evaluated precisely, a completely random process would likely lead to a better outcome than some arbitrary numeric metric. (I'll need to dig through my algorithm resources to formulate a precise reference if someone wants for this last statement).

[chillwaves]

How does an IQ test evaluate whether a person will work hard, follow best practices, connect with their students, etc?

[seanmcdirmid]

Report for testing citizen, a career will then be blindly assigned to you based on these results.

I never thought Futurama could be used as a source on HN, but here we are!

[x0x0]

The gender balances of teachers vary wildly by level [1], and is over 40% male in high school.

I got a math undergrad at a good school. Once you got past calc/linear algebra/maybe diffeq 1 into classes that were mostly math/physics/eng students, future teachers were almost entirely in the bottom quartile of the classes. But maybe that's not so bad -- do you really need to understand real analysis to teach anything before calculus? Of course not. And to teach calc 1 or 2? Probably not.

My hypothesis is that's almost entirely because the career doesn't pay well. Consider working as a teacher on the peninsula in sfbay. It's basically a cute hobby that will have to be supported by a spouse if you'd ever like to own a house. You can see some of the numbers here [2], and they're horrible. Average salaries below, 2012 data, from [2]

   Belmont-Redwood Shores Elementary SD  $71,502
   Burlingame School District            $65,336
   Hillsbourgh City School District      $86,994
   Las Lomitas Elementary SD             $92,494
   Menlo Park City SD                    $90,271
   Millbrae Elementary School District   $64,168
   Redwood City Elementary SD            $70,965
   San Bruno Park Elementary SD          $65,713
   San Carlos Elementary SD              $68,379
   San Mateo-Foster City Elementary SD   $65,720
   San Mateo Union High School District  $83,384
   Sequoia Union High School District    $81,674
   South San Francisco Unified District  $61,639
   Woodside Elementary SD                $88,406

Those are hobby wages, not live an adult life in the city you work in wages. And there's something sick about cities once teachers can no longer afford to live, purchase homes, and raise families in the cities in which they work. And much of the problem is due to the wildly out of control housing costs.

Anecdotally, a teacher 10 years in at a local school on the peninsula works another 20 hours/week at my gym to be able to afford a one bedroom apartment by himself and to have at least some spending money. When he gets to school at 7, leaves at 4, then works another 4-5 hours at a gym, how is he supposed to get up and be rested and ready to teach the next day?

[1] https://www.aaeteachers.org/index.php/blog/757-the-teacher-g...

[2] http://patch.com/california/redwoodcity-woodside/comparing-t...

[aurizon]

The established home owners have placed a thicket of restrictions on building houses and apartments and condos that maintains prices at a very high level. There is a land shortage, but densification is battled = only those that have houses can afford them at the proper cost ratio. New buy couples have to pool income and pay 60% or more of their income to get into a place. Even rents = huge. There are many houses run as tekki bunkhouses with 2 people per room in a 6 room house and the city wants them all out.

[panic]

The young woman (and it is almost all young women) gets a degree, a certificate, and gets to be in charge of your kids for six hours a day, even though when she was in your English class in HS she would copy her answers off of the test of your permanently-stoned buddies.

Can you cut it out with the misogyny here? Teachers deserve more respect than this.

[Haven_Monahan]

I can respect them for their ability to control a classroom, to empathize with, and to motivate young children.

I cannot in any meaningful way respect, the breadth, rigor or quality of undergraduate ed-major programs in the US. Graduates of these programs may have respectable knowledge and skills-but that is an exception unique to the individual.

Apparently, the facts are misogynous. Damn, damn facts.

[GotAnyMegadeth]

I guess your point would have been made without mentioning the gender of the average teacher. Can come across like two points at once when phrased like that

[dgellow]

If you're talking about facts, give us a source?