11/02/2011
Jason Richwine from Heritage Foundation and Andrew Biggs from AEI have put together a comprehensive paper showing that public school teachers are, on average, overpaid. [Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers, November 1, 2011] One of the usual points is that most teachers have an advanced degree from a teaching college, so the Teachers Unions will say “look compared to other people with advanced degrees like doctors and lawyers, teachers are underpaid.” Of course not all degrees are equal. Richwine and Biggs looked at the average SAT and GRE scores, and well as the National Longitudinal Surveys that included the Air Force Qualifying Test and found that teachers were, on average, less intelligent than those with similar education levels.
The Daily Kos responded to these findings,
“The authors go on to base a big chunk of their analysis on "objective measures of cognitive ability" which they identify as "essentially" IQ tests. The first such objective essentially IQ test? The SAT. That would be the same SAT that year after year shows major racial and gender gaps [link in original]in scores. So if that’s an objective measure of cognitive ability, we have our official answer: Asians are the smartest, followed by whites, American Indians and Alaskan natives, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and blacks. Men, of course, are smarter than women.” [Heritage Foundation & American Enterprise Institute call teachers stupid and overpaid, Laura Clawson, November 1, 2011]
Well, yes.
She goes on, “And the smartest of all? That would be rich kids, of course.”
Actually, poor whites and Asians do better on the SATs than rich African Americans, so that isn’t exactly true, but it’s nice for the Daily Kos to hilight these other race differences.
She concludes, “That use of the SAT and similar alleged IQ tests is the first — and, presumably, they believe, the strongest — set of so-called evidence the report offers to prove its claims. Each of the other arguments involves at least a couple other jaw-dropping claims that could be made with a straight face only by the type of person who does believe that the SAT, race, gender, and class differentials and all, is an objective measure of cognitive ability. Yet they want us to believe it’s teachers who are stupid.”
While I wouldn’t expect a blogger at the Daily Kos to understand psychometrics that well, the other “alleged IQ tests” that Biggs and Richwine relied on to make their findings was Armed Forces Qualifying Test, which is, for all practical purposes, IQ test. Anyway, obviously the National Football League, the Military, Every accredited academic institution, etc. all believe that the SATs and other standardized tests are an objective measure of cognitive ability.
Richwine and Biggs study was not meant to discuss racial diffierences in intelligence in anyway, but we can thank Daily Kos for bringing these important facts to our attention.
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