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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Describing it as parents "complaining" about homework trivializes our role as the ultimate arbiters of our kids' best interests.

Evidence is sparse that anything works in education, once you control for social and personal characteristics of the parents.

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Subject matter expertise and teaching experience up to six years make teachers better, as measured by students’ results. That’s better than nothing. There are lots of things we reward teachers for that have no discernible effects, like education degrees but if you go from a system where many of the Math teachers have humanities degrees to one where they all have Physics/Math/Statistics degrees results will improve. Ditto if you go from everyone having a Bachelor’s in Math to everyone having a Master’s. Teachers are far from completely useless, even if selection effects are far stronger than treatment effects.

> Ditto if you go from everyone having a Bachelor’s in Math to everyone having a Master’s.

Is this really going to matter when teaching basic calculus?

Yes.

Citation pretty please.

It seems the evidence is weaker than I thought and we have no strong evidence that subject matter expertise is any more helpful than an education degree. Likewise experience may not help as we can’t rule out greater texture in a school leading to getting better classes so the teachers look better. Great schools and great teachers exist. We have no idea how to make either.

http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication...

> Assessing the effects of school resources on student performance: An update

> The relationship between school resources and student achievement has been controversial, in large part because it calls into question a variety of traditional policy approaches. This article reviews the available educational production literature, updating previous summaries. The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into account.

This is, perhaps, the worst thing about teacher training programs. I'm a teacher myself, high school math and science, and the classes I'm taking for my masters are absolute bullcrap. Just lots of busy-work with ideas that have been tested once, on a small group with demographics extremely different from my school, and taken as gospel.

Not to mention that the classes are all geared towards elementary school teachers and so are of absolutely no help at all to me. Then couple that with elementary school teachers being generalists and often hating math, yet they're the ones we rely on to give these kids a good grounding in the foundational stuff they'll need later on! No wonder most kids are incompetent at it and can barely add/subtract/multiply/divide without a calculator.

Really, I think education should be an apprenticeship program, rather than an educational one. Make it be like several years of student teaching, which would get more results than anything else from new teachers. They can see how experienced teachers work and really discuss it with them over the course of a few years, not just pay to get told useless stuff and observe a semester.

in montessori training most of the time is spent by the prospective teachers in the classroom, observing children and other teachers at work. and then they have to write reports about the observation.

it's just a few weeks rather than years, but it's the right idea.

just like a pilot has to look so many flight hours before they get their license, a montessori teacher has to log observation and teaching hours before they get to lead a classroom.

Now you've experienced what school is like for bright kids. ;-)

For better or worse, the pay scale in most districts in the US guarantee a salary bump for having a higher degree. As a result, there are degree programs tailored to this need, that are practically degree mills. Why didn't you study math, or science?

I dunno if it's as applicable, honestly. I was one of those bright kids that never had to study in high school (or college, really), but I always felt like there was at least some purpose to what I was learning, whether it was math/science concepts or how to write better, etc. And it always at least felt on solid grounding; education training is just a load of bullcrap that supports what the teacher wants to hear and busywork. Hell, I even have one masters class that has exit slips! In a masters level course!

As for why I didn't study math or science -- I did. My actual undergraduate degree is in physics; just due to various issues I ended up teaching (which I admit I enjoy, even if I'm starting to get burnt out). Dunno if I'll stay another year, at least where I'm currently at.

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