Disclaimer: I don’t have any expertise in the subject matter. Further disclaimer: I’ve never let that stop me before.
Eric Bradner has an article about state secretary of public instruction, Tony Bennett’s, proposal to reduce instructional education for teacher licensure in favor of substantive education requirements. In other words, as I understand it, place less emphasis in making sure teachers know how to teach and more emphasis on teachers knowing the subject matter they teach. Unsurprisingly, teachers — and particularly teachers of teachers — object.
I’m torn here. I have little patience for Bennett. What I’ve seen so far is a guy intent on busting teacher’s unions and willing to rub shoulders with folks who insist Genesis (and, in particular, not evolution) is the only viable explanation for the creation of humans.
On the other hand, my exposure to education theory suggests a discipline built on jargon and unprovable theories. For me, the “tell” was that in legislative hearings, educators would spend about half their available testimony time going on about their credentials. This was a sharp distinction to, say, engineers who were more likely to tell you who they were in a sentence or two and get straight to the point of what they wanted to do and why they thought it would work. My beef here isn’t with teachers on the front line; rather it’s with the education professors. (I had the same sorts of issues with political scientists when I was in college.)
I think it’s important that teachers know how to communicate with kids; particularly at the younger ages. The world is full of smart people, excellent in their field, who couldn’t begin to explain what they do to beginners. We don’t need these people teaching.
Doug,
I mostly agree with this post. I have about two iotas more respect for Bennett than you I think, but probably not much more than that.
Oh, and I have the same two disclaimers.
Doug,
It would truly surprise me if the intention behind Bennett’s plan is to fortify the rudimentary knowledge of teachers of childeren “at the younger ages.” That material had better be common among all teachers already. I believe that this is more likely intended to weed out teachers who haven’t a working knowledge of the material they teach, more likely in grades 7+. I can think of a handful of teachers under whom I studied in high school and college who were obviously just reciting chapter and verse from a text book, offering no insight or specialized knowledge whatsoever, whereby making themselves nothing more than a “book on tape.”
I think Bennett’s point, if I may be so bold as to assume a thing or two here….is that methodology and child psychology and all of the educational hocus-pocus that teachers are force-fed as they are trained, don’t amount to the proverbial “hill of beans” if they have no idea what they hell they are talking about.
Now, I’m sure there are folks out there who have never tried to study under a teacher like I describe above, and to those people, I say “lucky you.” The rest of us basically found out that it is a self-study course.
I, for one, would love to see teachers subjected to standardized testing like the students. I know my first economics class way back in high school would have been vastly better if I had a decent teacher instead of a football coach who needed an easy teaching job. If there had been some sort of educational requirement in place that tested his working knowledge of economics, that particular guy might have found himself pushing a broom instead of reading (slowly) to a classroom full of sleeping teenagers.
If something like this is Bennett’s intention, then I say more power to him.
good stuff!
two other thoughts:
-This is the sort of thing where a profoundly distorted market makes it more difficult to tell what a relatively free market would do. (See also: health care and health insurance.) If we had more competition in the provision of elementary and secondary education, there would likely be more innovation, flexibility and efficiency in how those services are delivered. What does that look like in terms of teacher prep? I’m guessing that it’d be more emphasis on knowledge of core material, with more in-class mentoring, but less emphasis on methods. That said, concurring with your humility, mine is also a guess.
-There are unnecessary and inefficient barriers to entry to teaching elementary and secondary students. For example, I am qualified to teach 18-year old college freshmen. But I would need a whole range of courses (ten?) to be qualified/certified to teach 18-year old high school seniors.
Doug, I agree with your premise, but I’m not torn. This is just more of the same politically-motivated jerking around with public education we’ve been engaged in for half a century, and if there’s a politician out there who really wants to aid education he ought to find a way to make that stop. Compared to that a little standard social-science pretension to expertise is small beer.
First off, where’s the problem? Do we have fourth-grade teachers who can’t do their times tables? Health teachers who don’t floss regularly? It can’t be history; the more you know about that subject, the more likely it is our phony-baloney curriculum would send you screaming out the front door, never to return.
And upper-level college courses aren’t designed to give you a broader outlook on a discipline. They’re specialized. Are you going to be a better high school Lit teacher for taking an extra semester of Beowulf? It’s a knowledge model which applies only in the hard sciences, if then, and one which is likely to result in colleges offering Rocks for Jocks-type credits.
Now, I’m a lifelong foe of the professional panoply of social-science expertise, and I’m married to a teacher, and know something of the details of her education. But we always believe the testimony of engineers, until the bridge collapses; the social sciences have to contend in the public arena with Bronze Age superstition and self-serving “business leaders” with no expertise whatsoever, excepting the ability to funnel money to ambitious political functionaries.
Well, most of my thoughts have already been spelled out in the above comments.
I just wonder what the next problem will be once teachers are “fixed”? Without comprehensive reform, one is just running from one broken table leg to the next, trying to duct tape it enough for it to continue standing.
You can have the greatest teachers in the world, but without addressing the totality of the problems, the table will continue to teeter precariously.
VG makes an important point: “fixing” teachers is, at most, a secondary (and distracting) consideration. See also: spending more money, tweaking student/teacher ratios, etc.
I agree with Doghouse mostly, especially for elementary teachers. For middle-school and above, it seems likely that some/more specialization and depth would be helpful. Even for upper-elementary school, one could make an argument for more of each. For example, I was in the YMCA yesterday and an education major was complaining about having to learn basic probabilities (e.g., rolling two dice).
I wouldn’t put too much stock in students crabbing about their homework.
Uncertain as to adding anything of value but never stopped me before: over 35 years of teaching, active in local teacher’s association (union for those that prefer that handle), and somewhat active in state DOE things: Granted there are lousy teachers just as there are lousy attorneys, doctors, dentists, and bankers and executives of multinational corporations, etc. all who were grinded in the subject matter; Granted there are lousy school administrators and school boards without knowledge, skill, or will to handle the responsibility and on and on.
This superintendent of public instruction has an agenda unlike any known as of late and exactly what that is many would wish to know. He fired over 100 staff members who were the middle administration of the department many involved in specific education programs and replaced with people from outside education background, he has been in the spotlight almost from day one without much support from most involved with education.
Would agree with some increased flexibility for entry into teaching in secondary schools providing they are mentored well in how to interact and plan for presentation of material consistent with age and ability groups they have as students. But there are major difference between subject matter needs of a 3rd grade teacher and a 12 grade teacher of a particular subject. And any comparison with university/college teaching does not make the grade well–too many factors such as motivation of majority of students and a great deal to do with ability of the students to learn. And having attained a BS and MS I will attest to having had some excellent teachers and some very lousy ones (particularly in departments where teaching was considered well below research and publishing.) Let some of those believing this change in teacher education requirement trying taking their advanced degrees and survive a year in the average school teaching a group of very diverse 9th graders.
Side note: those strong advocates of charter school need to have read well the recent material on some of the administration of some of the schools in Indiana (Fort Wayne article was very revealing) and now found to be engaging in wanting sports programs with ability to recruit from where ever. Give me the ability to accept only a select group of students (no special ed, no low achiever, no unmotivated, etc.) and do not have to provide transportation, reduced requirements for PE and some other Indiana mandated things—believe I should blow away the competition –but they have not done it yet.
The whole situation is a bit more complex than some advocates of change would have us believe.
Indiana ranks at the top in the nation in the percentage of middle and high school teachers with a major or minor in the subject area they teach. Less than 5 percent teach in a subject in which they do not have a minor or major. tony and al hubbard, a bush economic advisor and college pal, stated in an op ed in the Indy star that we ranked at the bottom in this area and thus we need to force teacher prep schools to require a subject major. They could not read the graph or report correctly and want to make policy on their erroneous assumptions. Indiana teachers, thanks to some strong union rules, are not allowed to be assigned outside of their subject area without agreement from the teacher and administration, so we have few of these teachers who do not know their subject matter teaching in Indiana. Most of our colleges of education require middle and high school teachers to have at least a minor if not a major in the subject area they wish to teach. All have to pass the Praxis II exam in their subject area to be eligible to recieve a license. So his new rules about strengthening the preparation of teachers is a bunch of bunk.
One issue of importance is the bind that NCLB and Indiana Rules 2002 put on schools, particularly small schools, in that a teacher licensed to teach chemistry might not be able to be assigned to teach physics because that teacher would be teaching out of field. Or a high school certified algebra teacher could not teach a middle school course in algebra. This practice was the norm for many small schools that could not afford nor attract two people to teach two different classes. Some flexibility is needed here and could be achieved through a teacher certified in a subject getting prof development to obtain licensure in another, not by obtaining a ms in the second subject or having to return to school for a BS, which was not common, but by taking courses or pd and then sitting for the exam. But this is not part of the new rules as presented in the paper. Most schools have dealt with this problem by providing online courses or sharing a teacher between schools.
As for college professors, these people are not trained to teach and it shows. Most are very poor teachers, even at purdue in the engineering department and business school. As for those teachers in k-12 who complain about their methods courses, these are probably the same ones who you refer to as bad teachers. They just did not pay attention or get it. If you do not know how to teach, and are not able to put that into practice (an important piece of the puzzle), you cannot teach even if you are an expert in your subject. Talk to Ed, your local superintendent in Lafayette. He can fill you in. Or speak with John Hill, past president of the professional standards advisory board, he is now at purdue and a retired superintendent.
And yes, most of the higher education officials who present at legislative hearings just do not get the importance of presenting well and not using their jargon. They are academics, not politicians. I have been after them for years to provide the evidence, the research, behind their theories of education which underlie their chosen courses. They just do not see the point in doing so. And now it may be too late to do so. mitch and tony will railroad the repa changes through their handpicked advisory board. They want payback against the colleges of education who did not stand with mitch during his first term efforts to “improve” schools and create vouchers. He stabbed Dr. Reed in the back and threw her overboard for the same reason.
All the research shows that children do better with teachers from traditional schools of education, not from these Teach For America programs or other alternative pathways. Some education programs are better than others in Indiana, we know Marion and Martin University have poor programs given the performance of their teachers in school settings. IU has many nonsense courses that have to be taken in order to graduate. Purdue, ISU and Butler have it just about right, as does Ball State–who provides much more hands on training for would be teachers than other preparation programs.
And remember, before slighting those who choose to go into teacher programs, as indicated by the SAT information, people who intend to go into business, on average, score lower on the SAT across time. :)
My fifteen cents.
Somewhere Alan Watts has a wonderful discussion of the Chinese language (judged by a total non-speaker, anyway) where, among other things, he points out that the adage “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” is perhaps more accurately rendered as “begins under one’s feet”.
Not, in other words, “hurry up and start moving if you want to get somewhere” but “think about where you’re going and how best to get there, rather than setting off like your shoes are on fire”.
Similarly, I’m still waiting for an answer to why, if contemporary test scores with no reliable antecedents are irrefutable proof of the failure of public education, the fifty-year record of futzing with education for political purposes which brought us here isn’t more so, and in spades.
Not to go all “group hug” on you all, but the quality of the comments around this place can be magnificent.
I concur with Canoe on NCLB– and that’s interesting to hear how Indiana stacks up.
In defense of many college professors, I would note that there is a profound difference between teaching quality at research universities and those which emphasize teaching.
If you want a sharper set of peers (at least academically) for your kids, send them to a big state school. If you want much smaller class sizes and much better teachers, send them to a regional school.
I used to wonder why our graduating students did so well on standardized tests. Then, I realized that when you put very good students (those who will graduate from a rigorous program) with very good teachers– and we’d better beat the IU’s and Purdue’s of this world!
So, no, I wouldn’t dream of sending a research maven into a high school classroom. But it is absurd to think that good college teachers would require numerous education courses to prepare for a high school classroom experience.
Anecdote, not data, but:
In my experience, I have never spoken with anyone who indicated that their experience in a school of education prepared them for the classroom.
One memory stands out – an associate recounting a semester-long class, where the sole thing learned of practical value was that it is better to clean blackboards up and down, instead of side to side.
I’m hoping I have only met the exceptions…
I am one of those non-traditional career path teachers Tony Bennett talks about, but I disagree with his stance on teacher preparation. I graduated from a “highly selective” liberal arts college with a double major in economics and English literature. After five years in banking and trust administration, colleagues and mentors suggested I go to law school and specialize in estate planning. Instead I quit my job and returned to school to obtain a license to teach secondary English and social studies. (I have never regretted my decision despite the smaller paycheck.)
I began my education courses in the days before the state loosened/streamlined requirements for people like me who transition to teaching from other careers. I am ashamed to admit that I did not have a very good attitude about sitting through what I felt would be useless education courses. I was wrong and so is Tony Bennett. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for me to dispense with this sophomoric attitude. I am not sure what happened to Mr. Bennett.
Subject matter preparation is very important, but so is instruction in classroom management, adolescent development, education law, working with exceptional learners, test construction, lesson planning, data analysis, . . . . Mr. Bennet has tried to make the argument that we need more of one and less of the other. He may be right that some secondary teachers need more subject area preparation, but it shouldn’t be at the expense appropriate teacher training. One could argue that we need more of both.
Once in the classroom, I never found myself wishing I had taken more coursework in Early English Literature or the Crimean War. However, not a day went by that I didn’t wish I had more instruction in differentiating instruction, teaching mainstreamed special education students and helping English language learners. I also would have liked more preparation in reading methods and instruction. For that I sought out help from elementary teachers whose educations had in some ways better prepared them for the realities we face in the classroom.
Thanks Lori, your story is the more common one and I share your experience. Good teachers know that they need much more preparation in differentiated instruction and working with english language learners than is currently provided.
Many of our colleges of education resisted the effort to provide transition to teaching programs when we first implemented them. They were afraid of losing money and not having anything for some of their more senior professors to do. The state went ahead and set up the criteria which allowed people to teach while working towards the TTT requirements. The TTT program was designed to draw in those in private sector positions in math, science, engineering and technology, but the vast majority of the participants were and are elementary teachers. The demand for the programs is just not there yet. Perhaps now that so many need a new career the demand will pick up.
Someone on the star comment site questioned how the new repa rules would impact our agreements with other states to acknowledge teacher preparation programs and newly licensed teachers–reciprocity will be an issue and may lead to many of our teacher ed students having to go elsewhere for training. Many of our elementary teachers end up in Texas or Florida because we do not have the demand for the supply in Indiana. Odd, mitch and tony point to Texas and Florida as states we should emulate since they are doing so well with students, and many of those teachers are from Indiana. A conundrum.
Pay close attention to how tony is already dismissing, along with mitch, the input from the public meetings as being from special interest groups. tony promises he will have the new rules passed in December, so not much substantial revision will be done. He knows the handpicked advisory board will approve whatever he and mitch put before them, having read it or not. In the past, all public comments were summarized and the summary was posted on the website and made available at the meetings. Will that happen this time? Do not bet on it.
Odd, mitch and tony point to Texas and Florida as states we should emulate since they are doing so well with students, and many of those teachers are from Indiana. A conundrum.
Oh, more than odd; the only, only test where it’s possible to compare state-to-state performance is the NAEP. And on the NAEPs Indiana has been scoring above the national average, across the board, since 1992 (where current test analysis begins), something Florida and Texas have only managed in the past few years, when they’ve done it at all. In 2007 Florida 4th graders outscored Indiana’s in Reading by less than a percentage point; it is the only time Indiana ever finished below either of the other two states.
Both have made praiseworthy gains, but both started out, seventeen years ago, as abysmal. To suggest that Indiana should have seen that sort of improvement, when it began and remains above the national averages, is just innumeracy at the service of political manipulation.
I never said they were doing well in Texas or Florida. It is nice to see someone is up on NAEP and can understand the meaning of the scores. Sadly, our legislature and mitch and tony have no clue as to what these mean or that Indiana students score at the top (just shy of being first) on the only international test that breaks out scores (TIMSS). conservatives looked to texas and florida because of their attachment to all things bush. Now that may change. Both states have made gains, but as you indicated, it is easier to move from the bottom to the middle than it is to move from the middle to the top. And we have not had the widespread cheating and manipulation of scores (they have very low expectations on their test and pass scores are low) that both of these states have witnessed. Remember bush’s first ed secretary? Cheater. Duncan, on the other hand, has not had much success in Chicago and now is trying to push his choice and merit pay ideas on others. Bad policy comes from both the left and right it seems.
I teach the teachers. I grow weary of teaching them the difference between it’s and its, and their and there. All of the theory in the world cannot compensate for the lack of a basic understanding of junior high school English grammar and spelling.
Rumor was that at IU the average grade in the School of Education was an A-. Many believed this , whether true or not, which says something.
The data I saw on this at our school is from the 1990s– when they received 70% A, 27% B and 3% C or below. Within E100, a lot of them struggled with basic material and with the idea that something other than an A might be the norm.
Ho! It’s the parents who squeal the most if their kids don’t get great grades. Has nothing to do with content or motivation, but instead parental expectation.
Grade inflation.
I do hope I used the correct forms for lemming?
krannert graduate school for those wanting an mba. One had to miss all classes and fail half the tests to get a c. Most were given an a on a very steep curve. Grade inflation is all around.
Remember, IU is not the best program or school for most things, for that matter. :)
For better or worse, grad school is different (everywhere): C is equivalent to an F.
Just a couple words looking back over my 35 years of teaching and how I progressed from very changing times from the 60s through the 90s.In early 60s high school students expected to be bored and accepted it,and that’s how I was taught back in the Eisenhower years.By 90s you couldnt get by with boring kids,and they let you know if they got bored.
Yet I was taught well and I learned the difference between ‘its’ and ‘it’s’ and ‘there’ and ‘their’ in grade school by a series of unmarried lifetime career woman teachers.Those were special years and gone forever. There was a sense that there was a list of things you had to know,and you learned them and no one talked back and we did what we were told. These teachers had undisputed control of everything where they were and it’s neat to think back.
As a beginning teacher I would have been helped along with a years apprenticeship as a new teacher. I taught my first 10 years or so with no supervision and no official feed back.That wasn’t uncommon back in 60s. I don’t think a semester of student teaching is enough even now.
Some early problems I worked out on my own……How does a teacher make a test that covers both what you taught and that you can grade fast and fairly? What do you do about students who are absent one day a week and are always behind and either are absent the day of the test or want to take it as a make up while they in sit in class during the test.I bet over my teaching career I spent more time with a handful of erractic attendance students than I did with the other 95% combined.Maybe students should have to physically attend class so many days instead of just getting by with manipulating credits?
Early in my teaching days , certain of the other high school teachers just went on a tangent and taught their own course.That never happened after the late 80s,as curricula were defined and unified…a loss of freedom but for the good.
And since I also did matriculate in France with some of my credits,I would like to see American schools(and I dont separate private from public) put more emphasis on student responsibility( appropriate to level and age) of knowing the official curricula rather than just what the teacher taught.It would also put teachers on the spot for teaching all that is in the official curriculum and students would have to know they had to learn everything in the text,taught or not taught as is the French system,if thats the curricula.I wouldn’t recommend French education in general because it’s brutal and the emphasis is on ‘weeding out the slackers.’ ‘A good teacher’ gets rid of as many as he can and that’s contrary to american culture,where ‘everyone can learn’ and ‘it’s up to the teacher to make it happen’. So I’d like to see more emphasis on testing the official curricula learned rather than what was necessarily taught.”. That would mean testing, with at least some of it, out of the hands of each classroom teacher,and that would be revolutionary for American education(and not apt to happen).But wouldn’t it be revealing to compare scores from the same test/same curricula from rural Mississippi ,black ‘ghetto’ Chicago and suburban anywhere?
But still basic 9th grade Earth Science should always be basic Earth science learned as tested..An A anywhere should be an A everywhere.Then we could really compare achievement and employers and university admissions would know that an A was an A everywhere.
Did any of you attend the ed roundtable meeting the other day? The items on teacher licensing said it all. One year licenses, no unions, teacher license and pay based on student test scores (how will they assess music, art, social studies, business, etc) and other items leave no doubt that mitch and tony are out to destroy teacher education programs, public schools and teacher unions.
We knew this is what mitch wanted long ago, it is now coming out in public.
If teachers are graded/payed by how well their students do or don’t do then each student has to be handicapped and the achievement level of each class has to be calculated and averaged like we calculate bowling league scores…. Back to the future of 1984.
Lou – I like your bowling league analogy.
It’s also quite true – and I shudder to think about how the handicaps would be figured.
When Waltz ran for office the first time, every single flier of his that crossed my mailbox had at least one mistake in grammar or proof-reading error. Some of them were quite funny, such as the one which stated that he graduated from “Wabash Collage.” I have very little faith in most politicians to help education. I would suggest that, as has been noted above, people stop assuming that a B+ is an acceptable average grade.
Some scoring adjustment would also have to be made for students transferring in and out of the district. If your district has a high student turnover – because, say, it has a lot of rental units, perhaps – it would not be fair to hold the district accountable for a student that had not been in the district for any reasonable period of time.
Oh, first, canoefun, I knew it was Bennett and Daniels who’d held up Texas as a model for Indiana losing five points off its NAEP scores in the name of progress; sorry if I gave the impression it was you.
I’ve told the story before, somewhere: my Poor Wife rescues a lot of library books her school is decommissioning. Last spring she found one stamped “Harry E. Wood High School”. She’d never heard of it. I remembered it, vaguely, as an IPS vocational school they’d closed in the 70s or something. And she started researching it, in the course of which she ran into a newspaper article, from ’57 or ’58, which said “IPS graduation rate rises slightly, to 49%”. So far as I know this did not result in Colin Powell rushing to Indianapolis to denounce our public schools in the name of his tax-free education scam.
And indeed, those were the days when we built things and employed people for life, and the seventeen-year-old male who intended to be a machinist at Link-Belt or Western Electric may have seen no profit in waiting another year to start earning the same pay; likewise his stay-at-home bride-to-be. (It’s also a time when IPS, absent Attucks, was homogeneously White.) Times have a habit of changin’. But does it have a way of making students inherently smarter, or more teachable? We have absolutely no basis for comparison. We have no grounds for insisting that 70% or 80% or every last student can pass Algebra. We merely announce–conveniently–that today’s schools are failing, for the same reason your wine merchant wants to talk about the 2005 or 2008 vintage, not the 1996s or the 1961s: he can’t make any money off something long gone, and he’s not interested in intellectual rigor where profit is concerned.
Here’s my Poor Wife on merit bonuses, which would of course go only to teachers of the so-called core curriculum: “Teachers rely on a lot of cooperation from their peers. When you start seeing the other guy get a bonus for doing the same work you’re doing–without qualifying for that bonus–that cooperation is gonna disappear.”
Ok, so if we require middle/high school history teachers to actually have an education themselves in history, what are all the coaches going to teach?
;-)
It’s been a while since I was in college. I wanted to teach history, but the only history course required to do so was basic History of Western Civ. Then the remainder of the ‘degree’ was training in ‘methods’. That looked like a snoozer to me, so I didn’t do it. My kids have told me, that was probably to the loss of a lot of high school students, since they say my talks to them about historical topics, issues, and movements were much more enlightening than anything they ever got from the baseball coach.
Looking back, I’m still impressed with how solid our social studies department was at Richmond High School. I’m probably offending by omission here, but in particular I remember the outstanding history lessons I got from Ned Wysong (Humanities), Bill Pendley (World History), and Ed Johns (AP American History).
Mr. Johns knew how to motivate us. He was focused like a laser on the AP test and had us public school kids rabid to beat the pants off the Biffs and Muffys of the world in their private schools. (Crude but effective teaching method). In the process, I learned an incredible amount of American History. Mr. Pendley was an outstanding story teller. He painted a picture, got you interested, and that’s how you learned in that class. I can’t pinpoint Mr. Wysong’s technique, but he was probably my favorite of the lot. I remember a sort of happy sarcasm coming from him which is a pretty surefire way to reach me, in particular.
My high school history teachers were both coaches – indeed, one of them had qualified for the Olympics. They taught and coached brilliantly. As you indicate, Doug, it can be done. Alternatively, although I’m a pretty good teacher, I can’t get hired to teach high school because I couldn’t coach any sport to save my life. Athletics trumps academics all too often –
This is a good discussion. I very much agree with canoefun. I am a secondary math teacher just beginning my career. I think “my man mitch” is out to destroy the public schools and the teacher unions. It is quite scary to see the union in possible jeopardy.
I have heard some mention in this thread that some teachers may not understand their content area very well. But Indiana does have a standardized test for teachers called the Praxis II that tests us on our content area, so this is a fallacy. Others have stated that they are qualified to teach 18+ college students, but not children; and that this is unfair or ridiculous. Well, I have had several professors that did not really deserve to be professors. They were quite knowledgeable about their topic, but did not know the first thing about teaching. On the other hand, I can say that my most impressionable professors were ex-teachers!
I don’t really understand the philosophy behind the licensure changes with repa. First of all, they say they want to attract more second-career candidates. But most of the teachers I meet did not go to college to become educators straight out of high school, they were older, and chose teaching as a second career when they were more mature. Second, we also have “emergency licenses” for at-risk schools that can again attract college graduates that would like to transition to teach.
Also, if they TRULY think that we have poor teachers, or teachers that do not have necessary skills or knowledge to reach our goals, why don’t they do something to help the current teachers? So many times I see finger-pointing at teachers saying “what you’re doing isn’t working.” This implies that “someone out there knows how do do it right.” So why not provide additional training or collaborative resources to our teachers to give them a better chance of succeeding? That would be easier than just changing the new candidate structure!
I realize that the unofficial answer to all of my questions is “because politicians have an agenda.” And that agenda is not student achievement.