Dave Reid is an engineer who decided to become a public school teacher after a career of 25 years in the high-tech sector.
He has been blogging about his experiences as a new teacher of math in California.
He sent this comment to add to our discussion of whether five weeks of training is enough to be considered a “highly qualified teacher.”
| As a new, second career teacher, I find it amazing that the adverb “highly” is prepended to “qualified” for any teacher with less than ten (10) years experience. What profession designates its rookies and junior staff with the same descriptor as if they were on par with veterans and experts in the field?While I believe select alternate certification programs can be advantageous for second career professionals, and in times where supply cannot meet demand, programs like TFA can help bridge the gap, but blindly believing that youthful passion will save the day is naive, and anointing them “highly qualified” is absurd.I wrote about these descriptors in early 2011 in the following posts.Highly Qualified” Interns – a Mendacious Misnomer:http://mathequality.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/mendacious-misnomer/)Dashboard Delusions – The ED’s Ineffective Measure of Effectiveness:http://mathequality.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/dashboard-delusions/Dave |
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
Let’s take this argument one step further and apply it to those who are in charge of administration and the supervision/evaluation of professional and para-professional teaching staff members.
In his book, The Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell purports that those who are beyond expert (i.e. geniuses or world-class experts) have at the very least 10,000 hours or roughly ten years of experience in their respective fields. Mastery of a particular field does not require the same amount of time, but certainly you would want world-class educators (outliers) supervising and evaluating your school’s staff members whether the teaching and para- professionals in the classrooms are at the novice, experienced or master levels. Wouldn’t you?
Since I am a resident and teacher in New Jersey, I can speak to New Jersey’s requirements:
Along with a Master’s degree and a passing grade on an instructional certification exam, a supervisor needs only a minimum of three years of full-time teaching experience in order to qualify for a Supervisor/Administrative Certificate.
Currently you need three years and one day of full-time teaching experience in order to qualify for tenure. Therefore, one can be a supervisor with roughly the same hours of teaching experience one needs to be a tenured teacher (technically, a day less, but let’s not split hairs). HOWEVER, tenure time is district-based, meaning, a tenured teacher must have invested three years and one day WITHIN THE SAME DISTRICT regardless of how many other years of experience that teacher might have in another district. So it is quite possible that a supervisor will have even LESS teaching experience than even a non-tenured teacher might have.
I am not trying to devalue the time/effort put forth and knowledge gained in order to obtain a masters or doctoral degree–I’m simply making experiential knowledge comparisons to speak to qualifications.
See NJ requirements here:
Click to access 0106S.pdf
With the new NJ tenure reform bill on the table, a non-tenured teacher will be required to have FOUR years of teaching experience to be a tenured teacher, but still only three years to be a supervisor. Something isn’t right here.
At one point, NJ required supervisors to have a minimum of five years of teaching experience for eligibility. My district’s current superintendent has had ONLY six years of teaching experience as a classroom teacher. The man left a semi-lucrative career in finance to get a teaching degree, and then he moved straight up the ranks to supervising administrator, assistant superintendent and superintendent, again, all with only SIX years of actual teaching experience.
Who would want an immediate supervisor to have less experience doing the job than he or she personally has? Not me, yet a great many of these hardly experienced former teachers are the “credentialed” administrators who evaluate experienced and master teachers in this state. The retention of public teaching jobs are heavily tied to the evaluation process which means that teachers are told whether or not they are doing their jobs and whether or not they can keep doing their jobs by people with minimal experiential knowledge of teaching themselves. Stop to ponder that for a moment.
Does this make sense? Well I suppose it depends on the administrator–there are no doubt many who had developed a high level of mastery as teachers themselves, and many more who have had several years of experience as teachers before moving up the ranks, as it were. However, there are less and less experienced former teachers who are becoming administrators and supervisors these days due to a supposed shortage of principals in NJ.
According to the NJ Department of Education standards, three years of teaching experience before becoming an administrator affords any educator plenty of time to achieve enough mastery to manage and support master teachers. Does anyone out there actually see this as a good practice?
None of my current building and district administrators have as much teaching experience as I have. I don’t mind if they have at least 10 years and I’m not sure any of them do, but anything under that and I pretty much take anything they have to say with a grain of salt (actually more like a box of salt).
Obviously, a veteran teacher will to the point where everyone is younger than he or she is, but because of these looser requirements there is great potential in NJ that someone with less training than a tenured teacher will be put in charge of evaluating teachers.
Thankfully, in my district, most of our supervisors are not only professional but helpful to the teachers by working with them to solve problems instead of constantly pointing problems out.
A supportive and responsible administration is key to a low-sodium diet of professional advice. 😉
I meant to post that a veteran teacher will “get” to the point where everyone is younger…
Sorry for the omission.