EurekAlert had a press release yesterday regarding a new study on the training of middle-school math teachers. It’s not pretty:
Middle school math teachers in the United States are not as well prepared to teach this subject compared to teachers in five other countries, something that could negatively affect the U.S. as it continues to compete on an international scale.
[…]MT21 studied how well a sample of universities and teacher-training institutions prepare middle school math teachers in the U.S., South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Bulgaria and Mexico. Specifically, 2,627 future teachers were surveyed about their preparation, knowledge and beliefs in this area.
[…]Compared to the other countries, the U.S. future teachers ranked from the middle to the bottom on MT21 measures of math knowledge.
“What’s most disturbing is that one of the areas in which U.S. future teachers tend to do the worst is algebra, and algebra is the heart of middle school math,” Schmidt said. “When future teachers in the study were asked about opportunities to learn about the practical aspects of teaching mathematics, again we ranked mediocre at best.”
I guess this explains why the intro physics students I see are so bad at algebra…
The full report is available for download, but the press release is pretty accurate. There’s also this depressing tidbit:
Future U.S. middle school math teachers in the study are trained in three kinds of programs: secondary programs, elementary programs and those that directly prepare middle school teachers.
Those that prepare as secondary teachers have a stronger math preparation. Those that prepare as elementary teachers have stronger teaching skills preparation. Those that prepare as middle school teachers seem to have the worst preparation in both of these programs.
Well, that’s just wonderful…
One quibble I have with the study itself: they state flatly in their “Key Findings” section that:
It seems clear that one must challenge the idea that ayone with a degree in mathematics can teach middle school without any background in pedagogy, an idea suggested by some policy makers.
But they continue with:
No such approach for preparing middle school mathematics teachers existed in any of the six countries or in any of the 34 institutions studied.
The way it’s presented makes it sound like they consider the second sentence to be evidence supporting the first. To me, though, the second sentence says that they haven’t actually tested whether people with a math degree but no “background in pedagogy” can teach middle school math. They may very well be right, but it seems less like a conclusion drawn from the data than an attempt to head off a particular political use of the report that people in an education department might find distasteful.