Elementary Teachers Given Low Grades

05/24/2007

Elementary Teachers Given Low Grades

The head thinks, the hands labor, but it's the heart that laughs.
Liz Curtis Higgs

The typical child in the USA stands only a one-in-14 chance of having a consistently rich, supportive elementary school experience, say researchers who looked at what happens daily in thousands of classrooms. This is the conclusion of a study unveiled in the weekly magazine Science, and reported in USA Today (www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-03-29-teacher-study_N.htm).

The researchers take teachers to task for spending too much time on basic reading and math skills and not enough on problem-solving, reasoning, science, and social studies. They also suggest that U.S. education focuses too much on teacher qualifications and not enough on teachers being engaging and supportive.

Among the findings on what teachers and students did and how they interacted:

Fifth-graders spent 91.2% of class time in their seats listening to a teacher or working alone, and only 7% working in small groups, which foster social skills and critical thinking. Findings were similar in first and third grades.
In fifth grade, 62% of instructional time was in literacy or math; only 24% was devoted to social studies or science.
About one in seven (14%) kids had a consistently high-quality "instructional climate" all three years studied. Most classrooms had a fairly healthy "emotional climate," but only 7% of students consistently had classrooms high in both. There was no difference between public and private schools.
Although all teachers surveyed had bachelor's degrees — and 44% had a master's — it didn't mean that their classrooms were productive. The typical teacher scored only 3.6 out of seven points for "richness of instructional methods," and 3.4 for providing "evaluative feedback" to students on their work.

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