I don't disagree with all of this, but I'm confused by the focus on things like SATs and where they graduated in their class. If you're teaching 3rd grade math, the grades you got in your B.S. Math degree are virtually irrelevant; we're not looking for mathematics experts to do this job, but for people who are good at teaching third graders.
Some relevant criteria:
1. Being willing to learn about, and able to implement, the pedagogical best practices in your area. You should not invent your own way of teaching math, because there is solid data on ways that are better and worse.
2. Being good at classroom management and debugging kids' behavioral issues. A huge part of K-8 teaching is just managing the class and heading off disruptions to people learning anything. This might even be more important than #1, because when you screw this one up, everything goes to hell.
3. Having some kind of positive impact on motivating students and making them not hate school or think it's useless. Fairly subjective.
My own experiences are that the "smart" teachers I had in K-8, retired engineers and such who were very good at school and had earned lots of money elsewhere previously, were mostly poor teachers. I'm sure they were actually good engineers, and that might rub off into them being good college-level instructors. But they didn't know how to run a classroom of 8-year-olds, or how they should structure the classes to introduce concepts in a way that works for elementary-school students. So if we're going to up standards, I would want to make sure we up the right standards, rather than selecting for more of those kinds of people. And I group myself there, fwiw; I have fine tech credentials but no ability to teach kids.
Some relevant criteria:
1. Being willing to learn about, and able to implement, the pedagogical best practices in your area. You should not invent your own way of teaching math, because there is solid data on ways that are better and worse.
2. Being good at classroom management and debugging kids' behavioral issues. A huge part of K-8 teaching is just managing the class and heading off disruptions to people learning anything. This might even be more important than #1, because when you screw this one up, everything goes to hell.
3. Having some kind of positive impact on motivating students and making them not hate school or think it's useless. Fairly subjective.
My own experiences are that the "smart" teachers I had in K-8, retired engineers and such who were very good at school and had earned lots of money elsewhere previously, were mostly poor teachers. I'm sure they were actually good engineers, and that might rub off into them being good college-level instructors. But they didn't know how to run a classroom of 8-year-olds, or how they should structure the classes to introduce concepts in a way that works for elementary-school students. So if we're going to up standards, I would want to make sure we up the right standards, rather than selecting for more of those kinds of people. And I group myself there, fwiw; I have fine tech credentials but no ability to teach kids.