“This rigid credentialism is shortchanging students. Agreed! Where would my public high school have been if it hadn’t been granted an exemption by the state from the law requiring education degrees for public schoolteachers?”
Of course, there’s nothing easier than teaching gifted, privileged students at a boarding school. Anyone off the street could do that. And it makes sense to have subject-matter specialists teach high-level physics and painting to elite, gifted students.
But a physicist is going to be ill-equipped to take on the challenges of teaching in inner-city New Orleans to students who can barely get to school everyday (as your sister suggested when talking about her students). A little understanding of educational pyschology, teaching theory, and actual preparation beyond a physics degree is going to be helpful in that situation.
Just because a drill sergeant knows how to deal with recruits in the Army doesn’t mean he knows how to teach language arts to seventh graders who may not hear English at home. And he definitely wouldn’t be equipped to teach a class of autistic students or a class with regular students, gifted students, an autistic kids all in the same room.

I’m sorry, but having been ‘educated’ by the pedagogically orthodox Peter is pushing, I doubt either the physicist or the drill instructor could do worse.
Nothing hinders education like a degree in it.

Rod,
For the record, my own state has a different approach to credentialing teachers. If you didn’t major in education (which I didn’t), you have to go through a so-called “alternate certification” program, whereby you prove your knowledge of your subject matter – in which you majored or have significant experience – through standardized testing and you learn about pedagogy via closely-monitored classroom teaching experience and seminar course-work.
I personally found it to be an excellent way to get my teacher certification in Latin. I had all the coursework from college (I majored in Latin), but didn’t ever plan to be a teacher so I had no background in pedagogy. So I was put under the wing of a mentor-teacher who showed me the ins-and-outs of running a classroom and the like. If I found out that to be certified I would need to complete four years of Education coursework at a college, I would’ve pursued some other line of work. As it is, I eased into teaching quite nicely and enjoy the work.

Nice ad hominem. Always classy.
There’s a place for education degrees. Teaching special education kids, for one. Teaching foreign languages. Understanding how to teach and motivate at-risk students.
Anyone who has gone to college knows how truly awful teachers many Ph.Ds are and how little learning takes place in many lecture halls. So being a content-area specialist isn’t always enough, even on the college campus.
So what about when you are teaching 6th graders who live in the inner-city? Or a class of 30 students that include autistic kids, gifted kids, and regular students? How about knowing how to teach the learning disabled?

“One size fits all” is not an educational policy that will work for them. Crucially, she’s not arguing that we need to be more flexible in our approach to education out of charity for autistic kids; she’s arguing that we need to be more flexible because it benefits us all to free up the skills inside these kids’ minds.
Children arrive at school from the earliest ages, even Pre-K(2) to Pre-K(4), as the product of, first, their inner nature and personality and, second, their environment. Children have unique worldviews, learning styles, and social/economic backgrounds to the point that their learning is never going to be exactly the same as another child’s. The challenge as a teacher is to exploit strengths and weaknesses so that every child has their own best chance at mastery. NCLB is so contradictory to that goal that it isn’t even fun to teach school anymore.
Grandin also talks about how wrong it is to eliminate shop class and art class, which are often the first things to go — often because schools that have limited resources have to cut those programs that aren’t tested for on NCLB-related assessment tests. These classes are the salvation of some neuro-atypicals, she says. It’s madness to cut them.
It seems counterintuitive to some people, but the key to early literacy for most children seems to be [wait for it...] art and drawing. It develops the necessary fine motor skills for proper writing and mentally regulates the brain to visually discriminate shapes and symbols into a meaningful context. Just slogging through the alphabet a thousand times does not confer literacy anywhere nearly as easy.

That last was me.

Peter: Of course, there’s nothing easier than teaching gifted, privileged students at a boarding school. Anyone off the street could do that.
You don’t really know much about gifted kids, do you? I say that not to be insulting, believe me. Also, in what sense were we “privileged”? It was a public school. Most of us came from ordinary backgrounds.
Anyway, I don’t think everybody has what it takes to be a teacher. I know I don’t; crucially, I lack patience. I would be a disaster in the classroom. My point here is simply that there are some people who are really smart in a certain subject, whose teaching style might be ideal for neuro-atypicals (not necessarily gifties). Joshua’s solution (alternative credentialing) makes a lot of sense.

I have long wondered how Temple Grandin’s observations regarding animals could be adopted to our classrooms!
My brother directs 6-12 grade bands at an inner city school. I went to see the concert at the end of his second year directing. I was upset because he allowed a student to fuss with his sheet music for almost 3 minutes before the senior band started.
Fortunately, before I could criticize him, he shared how happy he was with John’s performance. He explained that John was an autistic student, and that they had worked out this ritual for him to go through immediately before performing.
Peace,
Randy Gabrielse

“You don’t really know much about gifted kids, do you? I say that not to be insulting, believe me.”
Actually, I do. There are challenges to teaching gifted students, but not the same kinds of challenges to teaching at-risk students, poor students, kids who don’t speak English, kids with autism.
“Also, in what sense were we “privileged”? It was a public school. Most of us came from ordinary backgrounds.”
Privilege isn’t just about money, it’s about opportunity. Being able to attend an elite, public boarding school amounts to privilege. That environment alone makes the teaching experience exponentially simpler, in many ways, and why physicists and painters with no background in educational theory can flourish.

This is an interesting thread. Two years ago I left my insurance job to help establish a grades 6-12 school for those kids with ‘learning differences’. Most have ADHD in some form, with or without anxiety, various conduct disorders, some autism, Tourette’s, etc. As a non-public school, the majority of teachers need only hold a Bachelors degree from an accredited institution. We are not a therapy school, mind, but devoted to hands-on and multi-sensory learning experiences (sorry for the jargon).
More importantly, it is critically important to recognize that each of these kids has incredible gifts, but it takes some work to find them, nourish them, and get them to bloom. In two years now we’ve made great strides. There’s a lot of thoughts and creativity and just sheer joy inside their minds, but expressing those things is often a challenge.
To think that public schools can ever meet all needs is just ridiculous. At least, Rod, Pennsylvania has more sensible public-private funding mechanisms for schools through the tax code!

Peter,
Are you sure you know what ‘ad hominem’ means?
[Note from Rod: Come on guys, don't fight. -- RD]

I am told that my wife’s autistic uncle was an effective high school level math teacher.

Don’t get me started on the awful No Child Left Behind Act. As each state is allowed to have their own standards, the incentives for improvement cause states to lower their standards. So the year over year and state versus state results are meaningless.
Worse the underlying philosophy that testing the children leads to improvement in teaching is flawed. The homes the children come from are going to make a bigger difference than any changes in teaching methods or teachers. Hence after all the effort the achievement gap between schools remains and the money was wasted.
I’ll watch the video later, but the standardized testing non-sense really gets my blood boiling.

Having ADD (and not being diagnosed until my early 30s) I can appreciate Temple’s argument and personal experiences. There’s so much I could say about ADD, but I’ll simply say this: medication allows me conform to the demands of “normal” school and work environments with much less stress, anxiety, and frustration, but it does dull my creativity.
Now that I have a child, I’m not sure what I would do if he were similarly diagnosed. For all the troubles it caused (especially with reading assignments) it did allow me think more logically and laterally than my peers, and I would be very reluctant to suppress such benefits in my child. Perhaps I would forego medication and substitute (my) coaching in its place. But if such an approach proved too time consuming and/or too difficult, perhaps I too would give in to the temptation to medicate my child just to make things easier on everyone.

Sorry, that Your Name post above is mine. R Hampton, my school is new and small, but we have managed several ADD kids very well without meds or with a small amount in the morning. Your experience is right – the meds keep things calmed down, but that also applies to cognitive function and creativity. Look around for options for your child, if you don’t mind me suggesting it. There are school,s and teachers who WANT that population (like me!).
On a alightly random note – if you have ADD you’re used to that – pay lots of heed to the effect of nutrition on ADD and it symptoms. It can make a world of difference.

My 5 year old son has a receptive language disorder. I have long known that I will have no option but to homeschool him. I live in a rural area where the public school system has little to no resources to deal with a kid like him. His educational plan is going to have to be specifically tailored to his abilities. He is not an auditory learner and cannot follow complicated directions. Basically, you can’t tell Jonah how to do something; you must show him. He is a wonderfully bright child but there is no way that he would be successful in a public school.

I’m not going to join in the debate over public versus private, nor in the criticism of teachers with education degrees. I just wanted to say that I’m glad that Rod posted Grandin’s talk. We just finished raising three kids. One has what we’re pretty sure is Asperger’s (or something dang close to it on the autism spectrum). He’s in his second year at community college. In high school (public, by the way) he got As in several advanced placement courses but then flunked (in some cases, more than once) other courses (including keyboarding). Same mixed bag so far in college: rave reviews from certain teachers, but in other classes he seems to be in irreversible tailspins. We finally concluded that the variations were due to his very poor social skills (not to any academic deficiency). Where the curriculum and the teacher accommodated his social awkwardness, he flourished. But where the class required him to take the initiative socially, he flopped. An example that I am losing sleep over right now: he refuses to do a current assignment in his photography class, because it involves using social media to discuss the art of photography with his classmates. To me, his refusal makes no sense at all. It’s an easy assignment. He loves the class and likes the teacher, and revels in shooting pictures and working the darkroom. But in his personal world, logging on to a social networking site and posting comments is anathema, and he simply can’t bring himself to do it (despite weeks of urging and encouraging from me).
He’s a great guy and not a “geek” in any sense (Rod, I know you didn’t intend any offense by using that term). But he has this (for lack of a better term) autistic element of his personality, and it is a real stumbling block as he tries to move forward in his college career.
That’s why I’m glad that Grandin is raising the issue. I don’t think the answer lies in ideology or teacher-bashing. We simply need to find a way to accommodate these kids. (p.s. hope I’m not double-commenting here. The Captcha is driving me crazy again).

“There’s a place for education degrees. Teaching special education kids, for one. Teaching foreign languages.”
I agree with the first, but not the second. I teach a foreign language at university level, and I have a PhD. A fair number of my students go on to become teachers, but I never advise them to do the “education major,” not because I think it’s totally worthless, but because in my state, the requirements for certification are just overkill, and they mostly involve taking education courses, not taking foreign language courses.
To teach foreign languages well, you should have some methods courses, and you should have classroom training with mentoring. But if you actually do the education major, you will not,in most cases, be able to actually major in the foreign language without staying an extra semester or year to finish up the courses you would need for that BA in the language. Either that or you have to semi-kill yourself taking overloads every single semester. So, the requirements of the education major (state mandated) actually work against your having proficiency and competence in foreign-language content area.
To teach a foreign language well, you need to be proficient in that language, period. Kids can tell when you speak Spanish like Peggy Hill. You also need to be able to handle yourself in the classroom, but to accomplish the latter, you don’t actually need the overkill of the education major. Too bad that’s not going to change soon.

In my experience, classroom management is a major factor in success in front of a classroom. You can be mighty good at a subject but unless you can make those kids sit down and shut up and respect you, you can’t teach them what you know. If you can’t present it in an engaging way, you can’t teach them what you know. Hence the requirement for an education degree. I do agree that No Child Left Behind is a bad idea for a lot of schools. My state is supposed to have every student performing at grade level by 2014. Not gonna happen, but schools that don’t keep improving and can’t maintain 100 percent are going to get penalized economically. Differentiation is a big buzz word these days in schools so hopefully they actually make an effort to teach kids of different ability levels and learning styles using different methods. It’s easier said than done, particularly when some 10 percent of kids have some type of disability and the teacher is expected to teach them, the normal intelligence kids, the bright kids and the one or two geniusues in the class.
I don’t know many journalists who ARE any good at math. I just asked three or four of my colleagues to try to solve a sample problem from the local Mathcounts competition to see if my own answer was right. No right answer was provided and I wanted to use the problem with my story. All of my colleagues were intimidated and refused to try to solve the math problem. Hopefully my answer is right.

Small is better.
Vouchers would help.
We need more choices.
We need competition.
We need smaller schools.
Our son with special needs went to public school for six years and is now homeschooled.
I’d like to see more flexibility in the system. I’d like to be able to homeschool half days, with more control and individualized focus, and send our son to school half days.
Anyways, thank you for posting this.

Thank you, Julana, for pointing that out. School choice would sure break up some of the bureaucracy and groupthink in our school system!

I got an ed degree. One of my sisters got an ed degree. We went to different, well respected schools and both agree that we learned next to NOTHING that was useful in a classroom. Ed degrees are circus hoops that keep most potentially interested smart students from seriously considering going into teaching. Which is exactly what research tells us; teacher certification requirements have NO positive effect on student achievement. While a few components (ie a class here or there) may be helpful, as a whole certification has been shown by the evidence to be a monumental waste of time and money.
OTOH, one of my other sisters is a successful 5th grade teacher in a really bad DC public school. She got a BA in something or another and went into teaching via an alternative certification program. She got about 2 weeks of training before being thrown into a classroom and has since received ongoing training and mentoring. Teach for America, another alternative certification program aimed at putting smart young people into hard to teach classrooms has also been found to produce better teachers, although the number of people trained this way who remain as teachers after a few years is fairly low. When asked why they are leaving, the most common answer they give is in some way related to the institutional BS, lack of flexibility, etc (ie the same sort of thinking which views teacher certification as a necessary part of the education system).
I totally support school reform, but IMO the only way it will ever happen is to first tear down every last rule and regulation regarding how schools are run and funded, teachers are trained and hired and curriculum decisions are made. (With the exception of background checks to keep out criminals, of course.) It’s these rules and regulations, written by ideologues for the benefit of the adults and powers that be which are driving our schools into the ground. Get rid of them and there are more than enough good, able people who can and will step forward to help make sure that even the toughest kid in the worst situation has a fair shot at a good education.

Andrea, I agree with you about classroom management, and I do think many education courses are quite valuable. But there are certain apples/oranges issues. Education courses, stressing method, technique, and psychological development are crucial at the lower levels, pre-k through 6th grade, but as students get older, expertise in specific subject areas becomes an increasingly more important issue. If students sense you don’t know your subject, you’re going to have problems of contempt in the classroom, even if you don’t have open rebellion. I have seen this up close with teachers I have had to consult with in local high schools. A nasty secret of many secondary schools is that some teachers have no degree in the subject they are teaching. They may not necessarily have the education degree, either. They may hire someone to teach foreign language whose degree is in English, and who studied the foreign language only as a pre-requisite of their BA and never went beyond the intermediate level. The NCLB, much as I dislike it, is weeding out this sort of thing now, but a fair amount of damage has been done over the years.
And while good courses in classroom management, taught by veterans in the field, are an invaluable experience, there is often a personal quality in the teacher that either helps or hinders the development of good classroom management. Ongoing training and mentoring, in addition to good solid methods courses, are invaluable if done right, but there is also an intangible personal quality that either makes or breaks the person in the first two years. And just because they get broken doesn’t mean they’re going to leave the profession, more’s the pity.
Many education courses are valuable, and for many types of teaching they are necessary, and I have colleagues I respect in this field. But it might be more helpful for states to require a more pared-down set of education courses for certain grade levels and certain subject areas, rather than requiring an education major for everyone who teaches in school.
I will say one thing: the really super-bright education major, who has worked like a dog at his or her content area and at his or her general liberal arts background, is like a treasure buried in a field that you should sell all your possessions to buy.

A mild digression about shop and home ec classes. I think everyone should take shop and home ec. These courses are not usually suggested to college bound students, but they should because they’re practical life skills you can use all the time.
In engineering and physics classes I used the technical drawing skills I learned in shop. I use basic wood and metal working skills for repairing things. I also like to tinker and shop skills are really handy there too. The utility of knowing how to cook is obvious.
My senior year in high school I took a course called “Your Consumer Dollar” which taught basic life skills like getting a bank account, using checking accounts, the concept of leasing property, and the proper way to use and obtain credit. That last section boiled down to don’t borrow to pay for expenses or things that depreciate. The knowledge from that course probably saved me a lot of money because I avoided common financial traps.

The phrase I wrote above, “who studied the foreign language only as a pre-requisite of their BA” should read, “who studied the foreign language only as part of their requirement to obtain a BA.”

Bill,
If you son is anything like I was at that age, then I can understand his reluctance. For me, “common sense” and all the underlying social conventions were very hard to make sense of, creating a substantial amount of anxiety. In turn I over focused on every little thing I said or did with an overtly critical eye, cataloging every mistake that I was making (similar to what underlies or is often associated with stuttering). Even worse, I projected the internalized negative commentary onto everyone around me, assuming they saw me the same way. I felt as though everyone around me was Simon Cowell and I was on a perpetual audition for American Idol when I never asked to audition in the first place!
Three things helped: medication for the anxiety, time/maturity for the social adaptation, and counseling for both.

Teach for America, another alternative certification program aimed at putting smart young people into hard to teach classrooms has also been found to produce better teachers, although the number of people trained this way who remain as teachers after a few years is fairly low.
Actually, the evidence on Teach for America is pretty unimpressive with little evidence that kids do better and a lot of evidence they are doing worse with teachers who are thrown into the fire. A number of studies have shown that TfA teachers have worse outcomes than those who went through traditional accreditation.
I don’t disagree that someone getting a non-education degree in their content area and then getting a year of education courses, mentoring, and observation before going into the classroom is probably optimal. But learning some teaching methods and theory and ed psych is helpful before being thrust into the classroom.

Three things helped: medication for the anxiety, time/maturity for the social adaptation, and counseling for both.

Rod, you said:
“Education is not simply a matter of putting information into brains, like inputting data into a computer.”
Paolo Freire, the leftist Brazilian educator who wrote “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” contrasted the “banking mode of education” in which educators make deposits into the brains of their students and later make withdrawals in the form of tests. In contrast to what he called “dialogical education.” I read the book years ago, but was very impressed by the concept, and think Freire was really on to something.

As with the usual suspects when education comes up — and while I certainly respect the many who have posted here, I have zero respect for the half-ideas offered — we argue about binary choices and continue to watch the next generation join the previous one on the midden heap.
Fallacy one: My anecdotal experience has any basis in the general reality. Certainly, Franklin J. and others have been ill-served in the past. I have my own stories to tell. But really, did you travel the country, spend months in rural, suburban and urban schools, to prove that your pain is everyone else’s pain?
Fallacy two: Professional accreditation is a waste. There are actually two issues here, and the core issue has hardly been touched: The quality of the training. So, if one surgeon out of one medical school turns out to be mediocre or worse, we should tell everyone to avoid that school, right? And maybe it was more than one out of that school, deserves investigation maybe, but it’s the same thing as NCLB all over again. A bunch of politicos who think their personal experience (see fallacy one) makes them experts for all of public education. Feh.
Fallacy three: Education quality requires competition. In a free market, you are free to make a choice amongst the offerings, those making the offerings are free to deceive you, and you are free to have wasted your (or my!) tax money on them.
Education theory is founded in science, ongoing research and observation, and a blanket refusal to take 100 kids, slap a bell curve on them and teach to the middle. It’s that refusal that too many others miss, because the idiocy we see in too many states is based on politics and money, not education theory. Case in point: In Pennsylvania (where my wife has been a special ed teacher for over 35 years) the special ed mandate is unfunded, i.e. the law requires it, but the state ed subsidy does not provide for it. Since that law was passed, since education theory requires a different approach to each category of special (which, in PA, includes all of both ends of the curve), and since the lower the student-to-teacher ratio the more expensive it is, you’re damn right “non-essential” programs were cut. It was the damn law.
I am a product of public ed. All my siblings were, all of our children are. I have been a nearly continuous consumer or observer of public ed for almost 50 years. Take the anecdotes and shove them, because the data is out there for those who want to see it: Theory points the way, each child falls into a general category, and with small enough class sizes no child needs to suffer neglect or have his or her particular mix of attributes suppressed or become a source of tension. In the meantime, all of the children get a first-hand example of how to approach, handle and celebrate diversity, simply because they sit in a classroom where a teacher is just doing all of that as a natural and normal part of the school day. Teaching is an art, but like any skill the fundamentals can be taught. A person who stands in front of students and practices fundamentals is not teaching, he or she is just going through the motions like a robot. That’s why teachers fail, and those who work hard to master the art are the ones who succeed.

By constitutional determination regarding the educational system, the aforementioned legislation still applies as long as it does not go against the Constitution. This ambiguity is a consequence of the absence of a new Bases and Guidelines Law and characterizes a transition phase until the new law is finally elaborated and enacted. The bill has already been submitted to congress.