Teacher tests
01/22/2008 @ 6:00 am
Here is a great idea from China that should be implemented in Japan, the U.S., and just about everywhere else.
In January, more than 8,000 high school teachers sat for the same end-of-term exam that their students did. A teachers scoring less than 80 out of 100 points are disqualified from receiving future rewards and bonuses.
Via Yein Jee, Photo: Shenyang Evening News
This fails to note that in many areas, teachers of a certain age (or teachers who are “connected”) simply do not have the qualifications to be teachers.
Also note that the teachers will not be fired if they do not do well on the examination, and that there’s no real way for them to not actually receive a bonus/gift — of course they’re going to receive a gift come Teachers Day, of course they’re going to receive a gift come Spring Festival. Silly Shenyang.
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:58 amActually, a few US states already do a similar thing. A few years ago Massachusetts started requiring people graduating with teachers degrees to take a certification exam in the subject that they would be tecahing. Passing the test required that the would-be teachers had a grade 12 equivalency in that subject.
The first year under this new program, over 60% of the teacher hopefuls failed. And that was across most disciplines. The only subject where the majority passed was Home Ec. Chemistry had a 0% pass rate.
This disconcerted the Dept of Education enough that they then tried to retroactively make incumbent teachers also take the test. The teachers union, fearing the public fallout from having huge numbers of teachers being marked as incompetent, threatened to strike. Eventually, both parties agreed to not test incumbents and to dumb down the test a little so that the failure rates wouldn’t be so high.
See? Everybody wins. Except the students…
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:51 pm[...] implement this here in America! I’ve known quite a few teachers who would have failed. Via Japundit. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web [...]
January 23rd, 2008 at 4:51 pm[...] HT: Japundit [...]
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:49 pm