Tim Slekar, dean of education at Edgewood College and a fighter for teachers and public schools, reports here on Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s latest salvo in his campaign to eliminate the teaching profession.
He writes:
“Wisconsin’s Joint Finance Committee passed Scott Walker’s budget proposal dealing with teacher education on a 12- 4 party line vote. While the entire proposal is a partisan disaster that continues the dismantling of Wisconsin’s public school system—one item is worth highlighting.”
Future teachers need no student teaching experience. They can completely bypass traditional professional education.
“The American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence will be granting teaching licenses in Wisconsin.
“What does it take to earn a teaching license through the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE)?
$2100
A computer.
Web access
?
“That’s it! You never need to step foot in a college classroom or a classroom full of children. This is truly “fast-track” alternative teacher certification. Who needs to work with kids or learn how to interact with other human beings? That’s so “traditional.””
The ABCTE was created by Kate Walsh, who also founded the National Council for Teacher Quality, whose purpose is to undermine teacher education programs. It is a standardized test that involves no practical or theoretical knowledge of teaching. NCTQ eventually sold off its ownership rights to this shoddy program.
Professor Kenneth Zeichner of the University of Washington, an expert on teacher education, had this to say about ABCTE:
“”Wisconsin is considering allowing the American Board for Certification of Teaching Excellence to operate within its boundaries. This program, which was started by Kate Walsh and the National Center for Teaching Quality as an alternative to the push by the profession to implement a national board certification, is a totally online program that requires teachers to pass 2 online exams about subject matter knowledge and professional teaching knowledge. There is no student teaching/internship/or residency experience or assessment of teaching competence, and graduates become teachers of record in classrooms with “other people’s children.” I have been a critic of what I consider to be substandard programs like Relay and TNTP that I believe do a poor job or preparing professional teachers who will stay in teaching for more than a few years. ABCTE is worse. No real preparation and they end up teaching in schools where students need the very best teachers. Shame on you, Scott Walker, Alberta Darling, and the rest of the WI alt right.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Getting rid of independent teachers protected by due process rights and labor unions is one of the final acts to get rid of the U.S. Constitutional Republic. The final act will be a Constitutional Convention to rewrite the Constitution and the Koch brothers will be in charge of that through their paid minions.
Plato concluded How Tyrants Arise: “Thus liberty, getting out of all order and reason, passes into the harshest and bitterest form of slavery. … May we not rightly say that we have sufficiently discussed … the manner of the transition from democracy to tyranny? Yes, quite enough, he said. … A tyranny is the wretchedest form of government … the longer he lives the more of a tyrant he becomes.”
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/10/how-tyrants-arise-platos-eerily-accurate-words/#spmrEGmH02rb1pA1.99
Public schools are unfashionable, Diane, and that means traditional public school teachers are also unfashionable.
Besides- many of them are probably members of labor unions so the ranks must be purged.
The goal here is to lower wages. If anyone can be a teacher it’ll end up an unskilled job. Those 15 dollar an hour aides that cut labor costs for Rocketship and allowed classes of 100? That was no accident. Labor is the single biggest expense in public schools. They gut wages they can cut taxes, and that’s ALWAYS the goal.
This will only happen in working and middle class schools. Wealthier schools will still rely on quality teachers. Our schools will get the cheap garbage ed reform sells in the developing countries.
Everything we need to know in two sentences: “The goal here is to lower wages. If anyone can be a teacher it’ll end up an unskilled job…”
What continues to amaze me about ed reform is how higher ed supports this.
How dumb do you have to be to not know they’re coming for you next? Of course they are. Once we get k-12 teachers down to 15 an hour college instructors and professors will be next.
I don’t work for a college but boy if I had a tenured position in one and a comfortable lifestyle I would see the writing on this particular wall. The level of privileged blindness is just amazing.
I won’t cry for them when it happens because they were more than happy to support this in K-12 schools. They thought they were exempt?
Chiara, you are so right. They’ll be coming for higher ed and everyone else too. Teachers, nurses, doctors, police and fire, all of us need to stand together. No one can afford to be complacent. When they’re finished devouring the middle class, the upper middle class that thinks they’re safe, will come next.
Chiara, all you have to do is look at the labor practices in higher education in recent decades – aggressively fighting unionization among grad students and TAs, as well as creating an academic Underclass of adjunct professors – to see that it’s well under way.
In fields where the universities must compete with private industry, they will continue to have some well-paid, tenured faculty. As for everyone else, it’s “Look out below!”
There should be an “assistant” teacher component attached to these fly by the skin of their pants Programs.
Harry Wong: The first year is simply survival.
Can you imagine what it’s like without any classroom experience at all? At least with student teaching you know the basic drill.
In Buffalo, many of those inner city schools chew new teachers up and spit them out. Some last a day, some a week, some last a few months and then they are gone. And that is after they have completed the strenuous certification requirements of NYS.
I wish I could be a fly on the wall to see how this new form of teacher “education” translates to the practicalities of the classroom.
Using the Koch brothers’ playbook, Wisconsin is already facing an economic downturn since Walker took office. Poverty is on the increase, and destroying opportunity for young people will result in further decline. At the same time Walker took office, a Democrat became governor in Minnesota where they are creating more jobs, reducing poverty and increasing union membership. Walker’s regressive agenda is impeding growth in Wisconsin. This study from the Center for Economic and Research Policy, compares and contrasts the two states.http://cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/wisconsin-vs-minnesota-what-the-data-show
How do you just eliminate the teaching profession? Do they expect all children to sit in cubicles somewhere in a warehouse and be schooled by a computer program? Sorry, but these people are out to lunch somewhere!
Cutting costs means more to people like Scott Walker, the Koch brothers, and ALEC than educating anyone
Yes, Mary, that is EXACTLY what these billionaires envision. Training and subservience for the 99%, “leadership,” dishonesty, and taking everything for themselves, for the 1%.
No, Mary, the “logical” (and dystopian) endgame of so-called reform, after the unions have disappeared and all notions of traditional education have been effaced, will be to implant chips in infant’s brains, and then download whatever programs best suit their purposes.
A subset of the healthiest “specimens” will be reserved to provide blood transfusions to the likes of Peter Thiel (“Germany’s worst imported product, ever”) so they can pursue their fantasies of immortality.
It continues.
http://bustedpencils.com/2017/09/surprise-live-rock/
Negotiating with those trying to privatize public schools only yields results that push us closer and closer to the elemination of our public school system. It’s time to stop laying the bricks that seal our fate. We need to be the architects and design a world that empowers us to create—the schools our children deserve.
A CA parent posted this on social media this week. It’s a quote from her school board. ‘Schools of the future will no longer be in brick and mortar buildings… students will need to prepare for the new global economy.’
Where will they prepare? In cyberspace ?
Why??? He still has TO BE IMPEACHED IMMEDIATELY!!! He has a Russian Agenda!
This IS AN ACT OF TERROR AGAINST EDUCATION IN WISCONSON!!
I’m a retired Teacher and KNOW HOW IMPORTANT THE GATHERING OF YOUNG PEOPLE Is, to form a healthy, educated community!!
To take That Away??? SHEER TREASON TO OUR COUNTRY.
Walker is a cheese head with a lot of holes.