One of the benefits of running a charter school is that you are free from burdensome union regulations on what teachers to hire. For example, many charter schools hire uncertified teachers to teach their students. Terrence O. Moore, former professor of history at Ashland University and current principal of Ridgeview Classical Schools, a K-12 charter schoool that is ranked the number one public school in Colorado based on the state’s accountability report, states why his faculty is overwhelmingly uncertified:
Now a teaching license must be something pretty special to prevent Alan Greenspan from teaching high-school economics, you may assume. It’s special, all right. There’s nothing like it. The academic work required for a teaching certification amounts to a load of bogus classes in “child psychology,” emphasizing how troubled kids are and how little they can actually learn; in “pedagogy,” combining watered-down John Dewey as rendered in rudimentary textbooks and practical teaching tips that could be picked up by any sensible person after about five days on the job; and in a hodgepodge of other so-called social sciences, featuring classes such as “School and Society,” that are designed to convince prospective teachers that they are about the most important people in the whole world…
The subject or subjects the prospective teacher will teach, such as economics, are relegated to the Limbo of one’s “content area.” Content courses are the bitter pill one must swallow to get to be a teacher. How bitter can easily be seen by taking a look at the transcript of most any graduate of an ed-school. Every year I receive about a hundred job applications from fully certified teachers for open positions at my school and therefore about a hundred college transcripts, and the story is almost always the same: straight A’s in education courses; multiple C’s, D’s, F’s, and W’s (”withdrawn,” i.e. the course is too hard so let’s try it again later or with an easier professor) in one’s content area….
Perhaps more egregious than such appalling ignorance of the basic facts in subjects education majors propose to teach your children is their failure to understand that such ignorance should be a disqualification for entering the field of teaching altogether. To education majors, knowing the basic outline of World War II, including some details of the life of that “other guy” Winston Churchill, is wholly unnecessary. In the mind of the typical ed-school graduate, the substance of what one is to teach students—whether history, math, science, or grammar—is just something a teacher “looks up” moments before teaching a subject, or dresses up with some gimmick because the teacher does not imagine young people could have a natural interest in a subject he has no fondness for himself.
He goes even deeper and eventually concludes with:
Since the topic is off-limits in the accepted discourse surrounding education reform, the idea of training more “certified teachers” still meets with approval in the public mind. Over the course of two or three subsequent essays, I propose to refute the leading arguments for the requirement of teacher certification and to indicate how schools could hire truly knowledgeable, competent teachers who have never spent a day in education schools.
The full article can be found here. Also, Newsweek columnist George Will has more and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute writing in the Washington Post has more.
Link via A Constrained Vision.
Question: Does Alan Greenspan REALLY want to teach high school kids? This example is getting old! Let’s say he does though. Can he handle working with high school youth? Teaching is a whole lot more than knowing content area material. Delivery is crucial. You can lecture all you want but can you teach what you know?
Yes - we do need to have teachers go through these credentialing programs. I teach some of these classes. You would be surprised to see who is out there and is dying to teach your children. (and what they think is appropriate and what is not)
I am not against some type of filtering process, not even against some classes on proper teaching methods, but I do agree with the author in that the bulk of it should be making sure teachers really understand their subject matter and are qualified in that area.
Great post. THis is something that I’ve wondered about. Here in Spain I’ve seen abuses of both sides, where just because a person spoke english they became an english speaker. thankfully, in the 17 years ive lived here that seems to be cleaning up. but on the other hand, why shudnt my experience as a journalist for 20 years count. ok, i dont have a journalist degree, but i do have the credits, including working as an editor for a US financial wire, as well as a columnist, etc - but to teach in the States it’s almost unheard of. On the other hand, if I wanted to I could get that illustrious title of professor here in Madrid by teaching a course at one of the universities - where a degree isnt asked specifically, but what counts is what i’ve done. i have been offered before such an opportunity, just havnt been able to work it out with time, etc. but it’s an interesting thot.
NCLB (No Child Left Behind) has imposed a quite lengthy process(and amount of paperwork) of detemining whether or not one is “Highly Qualified” to teach or not.
All teachers, not just new teachers, have to prove that they have:
1)a bachelor’s degree
2)a state or intern credential
3)demonstrated core academic subject matter competence. (HOUSSE requirements)
The process of “proving” #3 can be quite lengthy.
More on this can be found here:
http://www.sandi.net/nclb/HOUSSE.html
If you really want to be a glutton for punishment you can also view it in the chart form here:
http://www.nea.org/esea/qualification/teacher/images/hqteacherchart.pdf
kelly, i totally respect your position as a teacher, and i agree that it’s great for teachers to have some training (in addition to being prepared in their content area) before entering the classroom.
nevertheless, i have several friends (myself included) who went straight from college to teaching at charter schools or private schools without california teaching credentials. the idea was that the schools themselves interviewed and decided who they thought would be the best teacher. sometimes we got a little training, sometimes not. but generally speaking, i’ve heard a lot of people say that a lot of teaching “practice” can’t really be taught in the classroom. it’s something that you learn by doing.
then you have programs like teach for america, which targets bright and enthusiastic college graduates, to teach in underresourced schools. the teach for america participants only get minimal preparation (i think it’s a crash course in the summer). but the idea, again, is that they’ll learn to teach through practice.
and i really think that there’s something to that.
H.P. - Would you also argue that certification is unneccesary for other fields - from doctors, to psychologists, architects, to real estate agents? I had my B.A. degree in my field 20 years before I went into teaching - I worked in other fields and got a masters at night because I had a family and did not have time to take out for the unpaid internship - student teaching. By the time I was able to do the credentialing, I guess you could say that my subject matter knowledge had increased and I had to do more testing to demonstrate subject matter knowledge and proficiency.
In my field (Spanish), I’m not aware of too many pre-credential “teacher training” courses - the university students learn subject matter. Furthermore, before new teachers can be credentialed in CA they must take the CSET to determine both subject matter proficiency and the ability to communicate/explain the subject matter to students. I was involved in one of the normings for the CSET - a group fairly equally divided between high school teachers and university professors of Spanish and linguistics. The test is no snap - tough for non-native speakers because it assesses level of language proficiency and knowledge of the literature, history and geography of the Spanish speaking countries, and tough for many native speakers because it also tests linguistic knowledge as well as the ability to teach a variety of grammar points to non-native beginners. The latter is particularly difficult for native speakers who, if they haven’t gone through a university program in the language or completed secondary school in a Spanish speaking country, may not have the background in grammar to describe what they do. Also tough since they often don’t know how to communicate what they know by instinct to beginners in the language. Having seen what it is like, I’m pretty confident that those who pass the CSET have the subject matter proficiency.
Enough about Spanish. Most high school teachers I know and respect (all from public high schools) teach their discipline because they love it. What excited them in college was their subject. The credential was a necessary finishing process. Once criticism of high school teachers coming from other quarters is that elementary school teachers teach children and high school teachers teach subjects. It has some validity as sometimes we get so caught up in what knowledge and skills we want to “pour into” the kids (and recall what Paolo Freire had to say about that!) that we forget to see them as human beings.
I agree that the credential is not enough. The ability to teach grows with experience, subject specific training, continuing education, etc. But one thing K-12 teachers learn quickly is that it is not enough to have the knowledge and to lecture to the kids. One must find the way to engage the kids in discovering the knowledge for themselves. Whether that be experiments and lab notes in a physical science class or groups working together in a lit class to apply the strategies we teach them in analyzing a poem or drama, we need to find what gets kids to own their learning and gain the skills the need when they move on to college and the real world.
If Alan Greenspan still has the energy and the tolerance to deal with pre-18 year olds, let him take the necessary courses or tests to enter the field. Then he can put up with the low pay and the unwarranted criticism the public seems to enjoy granting teachers.
I think we are disagreeing more on degree than on fundamentals, my only point here is that the ‘credentialism’ going on in public schools today is overdone, that the emphasis has gone too far towards credentialism that you are now sacrificing good teachers.
In addition, almost all studies I have seen show that education credentials do little to nothing in actually improving the quality of education being taught. Most results come from experience and even that, after two years, starts to give rapid diminishing returns.
And there is no better example of this than charter schools and the overwhelmingly positive results they produce, both with and without credential teachers.