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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'd like to see a requirement that teachers score above the 75th percentile in both the verbal and quantitative sections of the GRE before they can be licensed.  You could set a lower percentile for the very lowest grades.

Teaching suffers as a profession because it is thought one doesn't have to be very smart to become one--witness the low bar for entering a school of education.

The profession has never recovered from the outflow of all the best and brightest women once they were able to join the work force as scientists, doctors, lawyers, and business executives and were no longer limited to just nursing, secretarial work, and teaching. [/quote]

NP here.  I'm a teacher and these sorts of predictable comments are always so infuriating.  I was Phi Beta Kappa at an Ivy, then went to Harvard for grad school.  I have never scored less than the 99th percentile on any standardized test I've ever taken going all the way back to the SAT.  Over my long career, I've taught in public and private schools in three states, and my colleagues have almost all been highly educated--at least as educated as my friends in other professional fields.  Sure, this is anecdotal, but MANY, MANY teachers are extremely intelligent and highly educated.  This sort of disdain is unhelpful.
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First off, thank you for going into teaching.  With your scores and education you could easily have gone into a number of other more remunerative fields.  people are lucky to have someone as intelligent and dedicated as you as a teacher.

But I am puzzled that you seem fine with the overall low level of academic achievement of many of your fellow teachers.  A Business Insider article from 2014 gave the mean SAT scores for a long list of majors.  Here are the ones for education majors with percentiles I took from the SAT site:

Critical reading 482 (41%ile)   Math 482 (35%ile)  Writing 474 (42%ile)

These seem low to me.  I too am a Phi Beta Kappa from an Ivy and, frankly, sometimes I have found it difficult to communicate with some of my kids teachers who are 400 scorers.  I have also met a few teachers who are very, very impressive, for the understanding of their subject and for their emotional intelligence.  But they have been few and far between.

Maybe I am just very disappointed.  I want teachers to be viewed as an elite as our children deserve.  But as long as the profession is dominated by people who got 400s on their SATs (a crude shorthand I admit) I don't see how this is possible.

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