If you have kids in the public schools this WSJ editorial tells you something that you almost certainly already know. That public school teachers are as a rule, just slightly stupider than your average American college graduate.
Color me shocked. My personal experience with the teachers in my town is that they are well intentioned, slightly dim but earnest individuals. Many of them are very nice. And like most nice, slightly dim individuals, they have no idea that they aren't geniuses. They can certainly see no difference between themselves, and the people who take up other more demanding careers.
I've always found it fascinating that if you ask people to self describe their intelligence, you get estimations which vary from very smart at the high end to 'about average' at the low end. But it's a mathematical certainty that 49.99% of the population is possessed of a lower than average intelligence. So the tracking error for those 'about average' estimates is probably much higher than normal. In other words, the dumber you are, the less aware you are of it.
In my estimation, nothing describes a public school teacher better than that. Eventually of course, you get to the Forrest Gump level, and at that point, the difference becomes large enough to be noticed. But teachers usually fall into that 'delusional gap' where their self assessment is particularly unrealistic. That's really best typified with this brief exchange from the classic movie 'A Fish Called Wanda":
Otto: "Stupid people don't read philosophy!"
Wanda: "Yes they do Otto, they just don't understand it."
Transform Otto from a narcissistic criminal into a woman with a more pleasant personality, a love for children, and an earnest desire to do good, and there's your public school teacher right there.
I'm sure there are teachers who are outliers. But I work in an industry where virtually everyone is an outlier when compared to the general population. And by definition, there aren't that many outliers to go around. So if there are any in the teaching field, they're probably a little more rare, or a little less "out" than in other areas. A super bright teacher might have an IQ of 125. In my world, the girl who answers the phone has an IQ of 125. (I'd say this applies to higher education as well, but to be fair, they weren't included in the WSJ sample.)
None of this really means much. I don't think you need to be that smart to teach middle schooler's what a gerund is or how to navigate the Pythagorean theorem. But the next time some theoretician comes up with some radical new way to teach things, we should try to remember exactly who it is we're dealing with here. If they do their jobs and achieve reasonably good results, I have no problem with paying them. If teacher A does better than teacher B then teacher A should be rewarded. But let's please stop pretending that these people are the leading intellects of our age.
Oh... and when you normalize for any one of several standardized intelligence tests, they're also not underpaid.
3 comments:
" But it's a mathematical certainty that 49.99% of the population is possessed of a lower than average intelligence. "
Actually, it's a mathematical certainty that 49.99% of the population is below the median intelligence. Techinically, it's possible for 99% of the population to be below the average, if the 1% above represent some incredible outliers.
"And by definition, there aren't that many outliers to go around. So if there are any in the teaching field, they're probably a little more rare, or a little less "out" than in other areas. "
I've met some incredibly bright people that USED to work in education. But public schools do quite a good job of driving any bright teachers out. None of them left because they'd make more money. They left because of the way they were treated by both parents and their supervision.
That's a clever way to look at it, but empirically we know it's incorrect.
We don't know what precisely an IQ test tells us, but we do know that it tells us something 'real'. how do we know? Because the larger the sample size, the more normally distributed the data becomes.
There are limits of course, you can screw up any data. You can sample only Korean mathematicians, or the Princeton Physics department and claim that the data is skewed (and it will be).
But as a general rule, if you don't do anything intentional to F with the data, it's very close to normally distributed. That's real life. Other standardized tests go to some trouble to be normally distributed as well - sampling bias notwithstanding.
So in point of fact, it should be that 49.99% are below both the mean and the median, within reasonable limits.
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