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Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

the74million.org

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Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This answer made me unreasonably angry. Apparently to become a teacher in New York, you're not allowed to use your brain. "We are not told any information about categories being weighted and therefore we cannot pay special attention to the low safety score." means exactly the following when you're talking about a playground : "Congratulations, all the kids love this creative, high quality playground! Unfortunately th…

> I agree with another commenter, you should name and shame, this is beyond stupid and deserves to be called out as the idiocy it is. You do you want me to name, exactly? The tests are made by Pearson Education. The website for the certification tests is https://www.nystce.nesinc.com/ .

Yep, that was exactly what I meant. Thanks a lot for posting!

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You interacted with a homeschooled student who made it to college. Huge difference compared to the average homeschooled student.

Can we please not get into the homeschool flame war here again? Every time it comes up it turns into a pointless war of anecdotes, because the data on outcomes simply isn't strong enough for it to be anything else (trust me, I've tried).

The thread started with a public school flaming. Why only step in when someone takes the other side? I agree these flame wars are silly, but this thread was lost from the start.

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#154

Reminder to everyone commenting here: you are not an average student. The hard part of teaching is not coming up with dynamite lessons for kids who are smart and want to learn and are capable of doing so and aren’t hungry. Anyone can do that. Well, almost anyone. Way back in the olden times, 5 to 10% of people went to school, and it worked really well for them. Now everyone goes to school, and it works really well fo…

I promise you, this site is not as special as you think it is. The majority of people here are incredibly average (like me!), just fortunate to be born at the right time, be exposed to technology at the right time, get a few other lucky breaks, and of course put some work in. It’s super easy to convince yourself that because you’re successful you must be special. Remember that people tend to ascribe their successes t…

You would be average if you actually thought this site doesn't have a selection bias out of the world population. If you think HN averages out to a middle of the pack student, people who spend their free time reading text, you have quite the social bubble around you. There's also like 25 $1b+ founder/ceo's out of 50k.

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#155

Reminder to everyone commenting here: you are not an average student. The hard part of teaching is not coming up with dynamite lessons for kids who are smart and want to learn and are capable of doing so and aren’t hungry. Anyone can do that. Well, almost anyone. Way back in the olden times, 5 to 10% of people went to school, and it worked really well for them. Now everyone goes to school, and it works really well fo…

My grades said otherwise

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

States that don’t require higher degrees often have a wall on the pay scale that’s hit early in one’s career, without a graduate degree. What’s weird about the market for teaching master’s degrees, at least (idk about PhDs) is that this generates a ton of demand for them, but it makes no difference how good the program is. Teachers don’t care because they don’t really matter that much for improving teaching skill. Sc…

Thanks for the reply. It's not surprising to hear any of this, honestly, but I am surprised all the same. What a sad state of affairs.

My guess from what I've seen over the past three decades is that this started because private schools and some public schools in wealthy areas were touting how many of their teachers had master's degrees. Other school systems wanted to compete, so they started offering higher salaries to teachers if they had a master's degree. Soon it became very common for most teachers to have one. Amongst the teachers I know, most have master's degrees from the University of Phoenix because apparently it's one of the quickest and easiest ways to get that credential.

Back when this started, much of the alure of teachers with master's degrees was that they were highly educated in the subject matter they were teaching. It was implied that the chemistry teacher would have an MS in Chemistry. But now all the teachers I know have their MA in either Elementary Education or Secondary Education but none of them are teaching how to be teachers. It's a strange situation and recently one of them was ranting about the pay difference between having a master's degree and just a bachelor's degree had shrunk to nearly nothing. This is probably because the MA in Education has become so ubiquitous that it has little value. What school brags about the percentage of teachers with a master's degree anymore now that almost every school is over 80%-90%?

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#157

I am very close to obtaining an elementary school teaching degree (46 of 49 credits completed), and as of this year I am a full time teacher at a private school (which doesn't have to care whether I officially have a license). My masters program is considered among the best in the state. Unfortunately, I don't have many good things to say about my masters program. The majority of my classes have been interesting but…

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Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#158
post #61

Both of my children were taught by an educator without a degree until 6th and 9th grade. Both entered the private school system/public school system and have scored two years of perfect grades so far. We were a pretty laid-back home schooling family. My kids didn't spend all day nose-in-books, watching documentaries in the afternoon between violin, piano and Spanish lessons. Up until this year it was a closely guarde…

This is very similar to my own experience. My older daughter was home educated until she was 16, then went to a sixth form college (school for 16 to 18 year olds) to do A levels (American equivalent would roughly be APs, AFAIK). Younger daughter is planning to do the same. I did not even spend two hours a day teaching. They mostly taught themselves. It was fun for them, and rewarding for me. I also work remotely (sel…

Very cool -- it's always interesting meeting other (what I like to call) "normie" home-school parents. I would say the story of "2 hours of lessons, max" is probably the most consistent thing I hear from other home schooled (the kids will tell you way before the adults will -- when my kids found out other kids went to school for 7 hours, they were shocked)[0] :).

I had two families who led me to the decision, myself. If people really knew what a typical "I don't have an axe to grind, I just want to direct my child's education" home-schooled parenting life was like, everyone would choose it if their life situation allowed. I understand that I was blessed to have circumstances that allowed us to do this for our children[1].

[0] Many in the homeschooling community find themselves having to explain their choices, often, to outsiders so they tend to over-compensate with their kids out of a desire to not have others' think of their children as "weird". I tell my kids to be as weird as they want.

[1] Well ... my circumstances were anything but ideal despite how it sounds. We just made it work.

Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I taught in a moderately wealthy suburb of Minneapolis. With ten years of experience, my comp was about 50k. While I have heard stories of teachers from prior generations receiving somewhat lavish defined benefit pensions, I don’t believe that has been an option for new teachers in decades. With regard to vacations, we had the school calendar vacations (which is fine), but otherwise I accrued about 8 days of PTO per…

For another anecdote, someone I know teaching private with 0 years experience in the Bay Area / Silicon Valley makes $80k.

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Re: Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

#160

Note that The 74 is an anti-union, pro-privatization, conservative advocacy (disguised as news) site funded by groups like The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation . https://truthout.org/articles/campbell-brown-the-new-leader-...

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