Thursday, May 1, 2014

High-achieving Millennials underwhelmed with American teachers

"If American teachers are anywhere near as unimpressive as ambitious Millennials perceive them to be, then the state of public school education is quite depressing," Rebecca Klein reports over at HuffPo.
A study released Tuesday by the centrist think tank Third Way reveals that high-achieving undergraduate Millennials don’t think much of the teaching profession and would rather choose a different career. According to the study of 400 college students with GPAs of 3.3 or greater, only 35 percent described teachers as "smart," half said the profession had gotten less prestigious over the years, and most described teaching as the top profession for "average" people. ... According to the report, a majority of America’s future teachers now come from the bottom two-thirds of their college classes..."

Klein tells us the Third Way report, co-authored by Lanae Erickson Hatalsky,

called for an expansion of accountability measures that would reward effective teachers through salary increases and career growth opportunities, while working to keep ineffective teachers out of the classroom. "I just don’t think ambitious millennials want to be in that type of system, where the amount of work they put in and results they get have no bearing on the type of career they have going forward," said Hatalsky. "I think that especially for millennials it’s not just about money, its about being able to challenge themselves and take on more responsibility."

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