Qualifications for Pubschool Administration/Wednesday OTA

Wednesday Open Trackback Alliance open post. Link here and track back. More below the post body.

Or, “How to meet the requirements to become a warden in our nation’s prisons for kids.” From Hugh via email, with an addendum from me:

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Brit politicians and utility workers could probably very easily qualify to be administrators in our government schools.

hth
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From “Bonehead-Of-The-Day” award by Jerry Lerman.

Peddling And Spinning
The Guardian (UK) 2-May-06

Bonehead award one goes to British Conservative leader David Cameron who rides a bicycle to work every day to increase environmental awareness and who is followed by a car carrying his briefcase, apparently to increase political awareness. [emphasis added]

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Drowning in Incompetence, Part II
The UK Sun 8-May-06

A water leak that gushed through a UK Hamlet for 16 years, causing extreme icy road conditions and wasted millions of gallons of water, was finally stopped when a farmer turned it off at the faucet.

Water board officials at Hamerton Cambs insisted for 16 years that it was a natural spring.

“If that is a natural spring then it must be the only one with a tap on it,” said the farmer.

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You think I’m kidding (or that Hugh is offbase) equating pubschool administrators with monumantal stupidity? Just google it. Or click here and read for a start on some search terms. Or read this and weep. While teachers seeking advanced degrees (which darned near all require taking the GRE) scored relatively poorly—a little to the left of the mean on the bell curve—those seeking “Education Administration” degrees fared quite a bit worse. Yep. That’s right. The pool of folks who are teachers are demonstrably to the left of the bell curve among those who seek masters degrees or higher, while the people who are the managers and administrators in pubschools are demonstrably dumber than the folks they supervise.

Heck, the phenomenon of dumbness extends to all the professions that are involved in one way or another in ruining education:

In a nutshell, GRE scores of applicants for graduate study in education are on the left side of the ” bell curve ” distribution of scores. For example, applicants for graduate study in Education Administration – tested between July 1, 2001, and June 30, 2004 – had a combined mean total GRE score of 950 (Verbal – 427; Math – 523). That is sixth from the bottom of 51 fields of graduate study tabulated by the Educational Testing Service. The mean total GRE score across all fields was 1066. Which applicants had still lower total GRE scores than applicants in Education Administration ? Social Work – 896, Early Childhood – 913, Student Counseling – 928, Home Economics – 933, Special Education – 934 – education fields all. Other fields with mean GRE scores on the far left side of the GRE bell curve? Seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth from the left tip of the curve, respectively: Public Administration ( ” practices and roles of public bureaucracies ” ) – 965, Other Education – 968, Elementary Education – 970, Education Evaluation and Research – 985, Other Social Science – 993.

Note the pattern: Eighty plus percent on far-left-side-of-the-GRE-bell-curve are headed for – or, more likely, already employed by – public education systems. Ninety plus percent are headed for some form of government employment.

The picture is not unrelievedly bleak. There is a GRE outlier in the public education world: Secondary Education – 1063, in the middle of the GRE bell curve. That makes sense. Many secondary school teachers have academic degrees. Problems at the high school level may have less to do with teacher aptitude than with students ‘ K-8 preparation, with the regulatory/contractual straitjacket in which high schools operate, and with education administrators ‘ aptitude (mean GRE – 950), which likely contributes, for example, to school systems ‘ tolerance of out-of-field teaching:

On average, then, the best of teachers—as a class: secondary level teachers—are average. What that makes pubschool administrators—as a class—is subnormal.

Or, as I like to put it from my years’ exposure to the breed, dumber than rocks.

N.B. All of these assessments are based on differentiated classes of persons, determined by both such objective criteria as GRE scores and subjective evaluation based on performance, personal evaluation of curricula I’ve been exposed to for advanced work in education and ed admin, etc. There ARE sterling examples among teachers, administrators and ancilliary personnel in our schools. I have known many fine, intelligent, hard-working teachers (often “beaten down” or burned out by the system and often ganged up on by lazy, incompetent and stupid colleagues *sigh*) and three very good principals. Exceptions do exist within this sub(human) species.

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