Tom Shuford is a retired teacher and a board member for the North Carolina Education Alliance.
His letter in the Raleigh News & Observer pointed out a disturbing statistic from the Graduate Record Examination —
Within the Education category, applicants for graduate study in educational administration had the lowest individual and composite scores: mean verbal — 429; mean quantitative — 520; total composite — 949. That happens to be the lowest individual and composite scores of all 34 subcategories tabulated by the Educational Testing Service.
Assuming that most of the education administration applicants are accepted [virtually all are] and eventually certified to lead schools and school systems, what do data like these mean for the quality of the decision-making about curricular issues, methods, teachers, etc?
