Governor Mark Dayton of Minnesota has become a hero of public education.
Despite the pleas of the entire corporate reform movement in Minnesota, Dayton vetoed a bill that would have created a pathway into teaching for uncertified teachers, legislation needed to maintain a teaching force for charter schools.
Minnesota Governor “Disrupts” Right-Wing Education Reformers
Diane Ravitch's blog 
legislation needed to maintain a (cheap, easy to bully and control) teaching force for charter schools without a medical or retirement plan
Work longer hours, follow the scripts we give you, keep your mouth shut, get paid less and do exactly what we say or else we will destroy your life.
How is organized crime different than the corporate K-12 education industry?
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Perhaps many are avoiding/leaving the teaching profession because we’ve already destroyed your life: NEVER speak up in defense of your students or community; NEVER organize any resistance to top-down treatment; NEVER demand any respect or professional recognition…
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The Commonwealth of Virginia has an excellent “career switcher” program. It enables people, to obtain a certification to teach in public schools. see
https://lfccworkforce.com/becomeateacher/
This program is supported by the Virginia Education Association.
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When the MA Ed Reform Act was created in 1993/4, it did NOT require teachers in charter schools to be licensed. That was intended as a perk to encourage academically strong teachers (people with MAs, MSs, and Ph.D.s) to teach in K-12; they would not have to take education coursework to get licensed. It worked as intended. The Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School in Marlborough was able to hire Eastern European immigrants with Ph.D.s in math or science or computer science as teachers. Superintendents of charter schools could hire people as teachers directly from liberal arts colleges–and did. I spoke to several of these teachers; those with advanced academic degrees or classics majors would never have taken ed school coursework to become licensed to teach in regular public schools. Academically oriented private schools had long hired graduates of good liberal arts colleges with no ed coursework in their background. It was a tradition for them.
ESSA requires all teachers in schools receiving Title I money to be certified or licensed. Sorry to say, there is almost nothing about a teaching license in most states that means academic quality. If charter schools in any state accept Title I money, we are apt to have fewer highly academically qualified teachers teaching high school math and science courses there (if non-licensed teachers were allowed to teach in the state). We don’t have enough of them in regular high schools, to begin with. Requiring a license for the teacher of calculus does not get us more teachers capable of teaching calculus. It’s apt to get us fewer.
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Judging from the devastation that charter schools have caused to public schools across the country, we definitely should all jump in and help charters find all the foreign PhDs running around loose who seek the privilege of teaching in these fine institutions of learning. Heck, just think of all the highly educated people we could import from oversees to happily work for peanuts. So someone in a selective charter got a math and/or physics PhD while someone else in a neighborhood public school saw larger class sizes and/or fewer class choices. I cannot speak for the quality of the decisions that MA has made (although it seems to me that the people did recently pass a measure to halt the expansion of their wonderful charters); I can look around the country and see what shortsightedness and/or greed has done to public school systems.
I realize that you could talk rings around me when it comes to (higher) mathematics; I am less convinced that you could talk rings around me when it comes to teaching. Is the solution really to hire advanced degrees with no educational background rather than working to improve current programs? I’m sorry, but having an advanced degree does not make you capable of teaching. I am just fine with private schools hiring whoever they want. They can pick and choose their students and kick them out if they don’t toe the line. I am not fine with taking taxpayer funding from already under-resourced public schools and giving it to charters that have no accountability to the communities forced to fund them.
I apologize for the snark. I should probably delete this tirade. I don’t disagree with some of your concerns, or your professionalism. Accepting non-licensed teachers for math and science because academically qualified people won’t jump through the hoops required of other potential teachers somehow just doesn’t seem to be quite the message we should want to send. I am sure you have noticed that math and science teachers are not the only ones not entering the profession (or leaving it).
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While not requiring license will draw a share of highly-qualified academics to both charter and private schools, it also lets in everyone else with a bachelor’s and a pulse. Private schools can take care of themselves. Taxpayers support charters and expect standards. If licensing reqts obstruct recruitment of highly-qualified candidates, establish a special licencing reqt to suit, don’t eliminate them all. MA seems to have fixed this in 2000 by adding a couple of measures to ensure basic communication ability plus subject-area competence for charter teachers. Did the changes curtail the recruitment of highly-qualified candidates ? Seems similar to alt-route licensure established in many states, w/specifics designed to address local needs, & meeting ESSA reqts for Title I funding.
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Yea for Minnesota!
Sent from my iPhone
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A charter school is not a place where one would teach for twenty years – it is not sustainable, neither monetarily or otherwise.
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After 2002, MA required all prospective teachers for charters to pass our subject knowledge test. They still didn’t have to be certified/licensed. What mattered was whether they knew the subject they taught. The interested Ph.D.s I refer to were legitimate immigrants and remembered the kind of teachers they had had in high school.
I would support that requirement for all high school subject teachers in MA. We might have more qualified math/science/poli sci/English HS teachers if we did. Until about the 1950s or 1960s, high schools in MA hired liberal arts majors straight out of college. No license/certificate needed at all. Required only for elem/MS.
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Sandra,
An anecdote but not irrelevant. A young woman I knew received her BA from an Ivy League college. She then obtained a masters’ degree in literature from Oxford. She decided to teach. She landed a job in an excellent NYC public high school. She was a terrible teacher. She couldn’t control the class. Her lesson plans were poor. She came home crying every day. She quit after one semester.
How can Teaching be a profession if anyone with a bachelor’s degree is admitted, with no professional education?
In many states, your idea is being implemented now to open teaching to untrained college graduates who need a job but have no talent as teachers.
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I was a student a bit like your acquaintance,– on scholarship at an Ivy League, studying what I loved (for. langs & lit), spurning 2 of the 4 cert-reqd courses. Traded the low-rep courses & student-teaching (& a lower priv-sch salary) for grad-level Fr lit courses. So many teachers in the family I figured I was a ‘natural’. Fortunately for me a mentor-prof arranged a semester of adult-ed so I’d have at least some time in front of a class. & my fine priv-sch dept-head mentored me further, so I was not terrible. Still, I would have greatly benefited from one (if not two!) semesters as a student teacher. And the pedagogy/ curriculum studied in good lang-teaching programs is far more comprehensive today. To me, this is the important training.
I’m also underwhelmed by requiring Praxis et al competency exams for license. Competency in one’s field can best be judged by caliber of major program combined w/grades in major courses, no? It makes sense for long-ago BA degrees, or career-switcher alt-route applicants. But for recent grads, it’s… just an exam score. What is it telling prospective employers that isn’t already on the transcript?
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The prof ed many teachers get today in ed schools does not make them good teachers. Good private schools in MA never looked for licensed tchrs in High School. Some hire classics majors/Ph.D.s and are satisfied. New teachers are supervised by Head. Kids are there by choice and are expected to behave. (That’s missing in public schools.)
Research finds that only trait of an effective teacher is knowledge of subject taught–on average. There are always exceptions.
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Interesting, & thanks for the exchange. I have tunnel-view as a teacher of conversational FL to very young students. That is a specialty where pedagogy is everything. And yet– contradicting my own point– Praxis (or at least the conversational interview) should be reqd for non-native speakers to ensure a basic level of fluency.
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Another anecdote…my sister taught math at the high school level for a number of years and won awards for her teaching. Her advanced students voted her the best teacher, but she said that if she was rated on the performance of her basic students, the picture would have been much different. What does research say about different student populations? What “measure” is being used to determine “doing well”? We are aware of the connection between high test scores and socio-economic background. On average, those students do quite well. Too bad everyone isn’t “average.” Too bad teacher effects on standardized tests seem to be in the range of 1-14%. Obviously content knowledge is important especially when one is teaching at a level where one specializes in a subject. I can’t think of a profession where what you know isn’t an important factor, but it certainly doesn’t determine how well you deliver/use that knowledge and/or how well it is received.
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