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The governor of Iowa, Terry Branstad, has several ideas to try and improve education in his state. One of these would require minimum grade point averages of students who want to enter into education programs at Iowa’s state universities.
According to an article by Jens Manuel Krogstad in the Des Moines Register:
College students who apply to the state’s 32 teacher preparation schools would need a minimum grade-point average of 3.0 — a B average — under the proposal that was unveiled in October as part of Gov. Terry Branstad’s education blueprint.
The change would give Iowa, which now has no minimum grade-point average requirement, one of the most selective teacher preparation programs in the United States. The logic behind the move, according to supporters: Tougher standards would yield better teachers for Iowa youngsters.
Some Iowa critics complain that there’s no evidence that a student’s early GPA predicts success as a teacher (the GPA requirement would apply to students who are already in college but want to enter education specializations in order to become teachers).
This is true—though mere reason would dictate than someone who can’t manage to obtain a 3.0 isn’t exactly the best candidate for any specific profession—but another problem might be one of human resources. Krogstad found that one in five prospective teachers wouldn’t have been admitted to education programs under Branstad’s proposed changes.
Making teaching a more selective program, without doing anything to make the professional more attractive, may simply reduce the amount of new teachers Iowa has available.
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Texas Aggie on December 07, 2011 12:59 PM:
I was taking courses leading to certification in PA. In two of my classes, Psych and Ed Psych, some of the students were just godawful, and in the Ed Psych course the teacher had to curve the grades so that some of them passed with 30% on their exams. It was not a difficult course at all. A normal person could have gotten B's without studying. And this seems to be characteristic of many teacher training programs.
At Texas A&M before they changed their curriculum and revamped the undergraduate education major, the teacher would hand out the test itself to study a week before the exam and some of the students were still flunking. I don't know what the situation is now.
While requiring decent grades in order to get into a teaching program may eliminate a few who would have excelled, it also eliminates a lot who have no business being in a classroom. I'll go with a few false negatives in order to select for true positives.