Here’s a summer school rumor:

“If you’ve taught summer school the last two years, you’ll be at the bottom of the list.”

“Why?”

“To give people who didn’t get to do it a chance.”

Yes, this is pretty much the same thing my dad told me and my brother when we got the new Sega Genesis: “It’s your brother’s turn now.” Given, teaching is supposed to be a bit more nuanced than prepubescent boys playing archaic video games. What to do. Could be just a shady rumor, but this is the word on the street.

So for the regular school year, the longer you’ve taught, the safer you are. For summer school, the opposite applies. Shorter days, different curriculum, and different standards for deciding who gets to teach. And for added comedy, last summer we had competitive interviews for summer school. Therefore, those teachers that were selected via the interview process will now be shuttled to the back of their line because “they’ve had their turn.”

Take it as a kick in the pants. (07/08)

It’s not the first time I’ve read this sort of statistic, unfortunately. This one’s courtesty of J. Martin Rochester’s 2002 book Class Warfare:

“Michael Kirst, an education professor at Stanford, acknowledges that ‘regrettably, when compared to applicants for professional training in business, medicine, and law, education students have low grades and dismal SAT and GRE scores.’ In one study reported by Kirst, teachers-in-training ranked fourteenth out of sixteen occupational groupings on SAT verbal scores and fifteenth out of sixteen on quantitative scores” (202).

This data is not exactly current, and I wonder how teachers stack up as of 2008. I know that every graduate program in education I’ve ever heard of doesn’t even require you to take the GRE. I had to take it to get into an educational policy program, but the graduate program in education at the same university was one of the only ones that did not require applicants to submit GRE scores.

And how’s this for embarrassing: In the early 90′s, the California Teacher’s Association actually filed a brief that stated

“the (CBEST) was a ‘major impediment’ to achieving ethnic and racial diversity in the schools….50,000 minority plaintiffs in the class action suit not only sought to dumb down or abolish the CBEST altogether; they also wanted back pay for all prospective teachers who flunked the test and were not hired. Not just back pay: additional monetary damages to compensate for psychological trauma” (Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White 350).

The CBEST (California Basic Educational Skills Test) I guess is designed to ensure a minimum competency for teachers. It’s not exceedingly difficult. I’ve heard that it tests math and language at the 8th grade level, and at highest the 10th grade level. When I read this sort of whining about minimum standards, for teachers of all people, it is embarrassing, maddening, and motivating at the same time. How can a union that sided with prospective teachers in arguing that the CBEST was keeping qualified educators out of the classroom simultaneously proclaim to the world that its members (including myself) be treated as professionals?

Hopefully when existing and prospective teachers read this sort of nonsense, they take it as a kick in the pants toward becoming indisputable experts in their subject area. Knowing how to teach is important, but we have no right to be taken seriously if we don’t first become proficient, and eventually masters of our content area. Many outstanding teachers should be outraged at certain interest groups’ devaluing of competent educators.