[kingkilr]

An alternative to what? Standardized testing? How about, non-standard testing? Do we have such a dearth of qualified teachers that we think we need to strip the people in charge of the classroom of any discretion? What sort of cognitive dissonance does it take to say, "Gee, this person can teach our kids the material, but they probably have no ability to evaluate whether the kids learned it".

[quanticle]

What makes you think that your child's teacher is actually qualified to teach the material that he or she is teaching? Teaching degrees in the United States are a joke. They consistently attract the dregs of the college applicant pool.

The fact that standardized tests measure students is a secondary benefit. The entire point of No Child Left Behind was to identify the worst teachers and either 1) get them to improve or 2) get them to leave. I wholly agree with this goal. Unlike most of the people making educational policy, I'm still young enough to remember my high school experience. I remember math teachers that didn't know how to solve the problems they assigned. I remember civics teachers who knew less about the American Revolution than I did. And I didn't grow up in the inner city. I grew up in a fairly prosperous suburb. My school was regarded as being in the top 10% of schools in the state. I shudder to think how bad the teachers are in high poverty schools.

To get at your point more directly, I don't think there's any cognitive dissonance at all. I think the basic premise is being questioned: "Is this person qualified to teach our kids the material?" Do I agree with the way we're measuring how the material is being learned? No. Our current standardized tests are like yardsticks, rather than calipers. But even a yardstick is better than guesswork.

[blahedo]

> Teaching degrees in the United States ... consistently attract the dregs of the college applicant pool.

I have to take issue with this statement because it unfairly paints an entire discipline with a broad brush. First of all, I don't think it's true that the teaching programs are particularly scraping the barrel (I'd pin that on some other programs, like business and criminal justice), and if it's truly "consistent" I'd love to see a cite. My suspicion is that the average intellectual quality of ed majors is about in line with the average student in general.

Second, even if that subgroup average were lower than the middle of the general curve, your statement implicates all teachers as bad, and comments like this contribute to undermining the classroom authority of all of them. I have no problem with calling out incompetence where it may be found, and there most certainly are individual incompetent teachers out there---we've all had a few. But if we paint all teachers as the "dregs" of academia, we make the job harder for the many competent and the several outstanding teachers that are also out there.

[yummyfajitas]

I'd love to see a cite.

The common citation is this one: http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...

[blahedo]

Ok, now we're talking about grad school, rather than college in general. This is an entirely different thing than what you seemed to be talking about (and what I responded to). As a result, we're also talking more about aspiring administrators rather than people who mostly just want to educate---even outside the "Education - Administration" specialty, a prime reason to get an MEd or an EdD is to jump tracks over into an administrative post of some sort.

Even at that, let's be a little careful how much we generalise and where we sling mud. In the first column in that table, "Computer and Info Sciences" ranks well below one subcategory of "Education" and only two spots above another; in the third column, it's below five categories of Education and tied to four more.

[yummyfajitas]

"Gee, this person can teach our kids the material, but they probably have no ability to evaluate whether the kids learned it".

How do we know this person actually can teach our kids the material?

Asking teachers to write their own tests is like asking military contractors to audit themselves and determine whether or not they charged the government the right amount.