Here’s an idea. Let’s have all those legislators who voted for the new teacher certification rules teach in some of the Arizona’s public schools until Winter Break, in classrooms where the district hasn’t been able to find a teacher. They can resume their jobs at the Capitol in January, writing budgets stiffing schools and bills insulting teachers.
Teaching is easy, right? That’s why they passed a bill saying anyone with a bachelor’s degree in an appropriate field can teach — and you don’t even need a bachelor’s if you’ve taught in a postgraduate school or worked in an appropriate field. The clever people who voted for the new rules should be able to step in and lend a hand, no sweat. Why, they’ll even get a few months salary, including the 25 cents-an-hour raise they voted for, in the bargain. On top of all that, they’ll get an official Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificate to hang on their refrigerators. Everyone’s a winner! (For those legislators who aren’t college grads or did their college work in a field not taught in public schools, I say give them a break and let them teach anyway. They’ve demonstrated how much more they know about education than educators by passing bills most professionals in the field disagree with.)
For the rest of us, here’s a little fun we can have. Everyone who wants can put ten bucks into a statewide version of an office pool. Half the money will go to winners in various categories like: Which legislator is the first to say, “That’s it! I’m not going back to that classroom tomorrow, or ever!” What’s the date that first legislator/teacher bails out? How many legislators will make it until winter break? And which ones will admit publicly, “I had no idea teaching was this hard. We need to give teachers the respect and money they deserve!” All legislators in that last group will receive a special trophy: a glowing light bulb mounted on a pedestal with the words “I finally get it!” engraved at the bottom. The other half of the pooled money will go to buy extra supplies for students in classrooms without regular teachers.
I’ve always wanted to see people who denigrate teachers, those who think teachers are pampered and lazy, who think any salary beyond a babysitter’s wage is extravagant, spend a few weeks in a classroom on their own without a professional teacher to hold their hand. I’m not a monster. I’d only make them teach a few hours a day, not the whole day, which I know would be cruel. The only thing that holds me back from suggesting the idea seriously is, I wouldn’t want to do that to the kids. But I’ll make an exception for legislators who are happy to vote to keep school budgets so low they violate the law. I’d like to see them put their bodies where their bills are, in classrooms without adequate supplies, adjacent to dedicated teachers who are working their asses off for their students but can’t buy homes or even afford a few luxuries beyond the basic necessities, in buildings years behind on basic maintenance. It would be good for the legislators’ souls. And it would be especially good for teachers and their schools to have a few more legislators who see the light, who finally get it.
This article appears in May 25-31, 2017.
“It would be good for the legislators’ souls”
Sorry David, you are giving Arizona legislators credit for something they have clearly demonstrated they do not have.
Excellent teaching is not easy, in fact it is very difficult and can’t even be achieved consistently as an individual. Most candidates going through the college of education don’t have the emotional strength necessary to achieve the classroom control required to provide a great education.
That’s why widening the candidate pool will increase academic gains in Arizona. Districts can train teachers much more efficiently than colleges of education. There is something toxic about colleges of education when the coefficient of a master’s degree is negative. Consider this: hundreds of millions of dollars spent on master’s degrees somehow end up with a teacher is can’t achieve the academic gains of someone with a bachelor’s degree.
Did you ever consider the possibility, Huppenthal, that teaching has trouble attracting applicants because the salaries in the profession are much lower than they are for most other professions requiring college degrees and ongoing education and / or master’s degrees to maintain credentialing?
Lower the bar educationally and you will add people who don’t want to take the time and trouble to study child development and pedagogical methods before teaching, people with BAs who aren’t able to get higher paying jobs in other fields and who think that when it comes to educating the next generation, “winging it” is quite good enough. This initiative will not increase the so-called “emotional stamina” quotient of the labor pool or its intelligence level or its maturity. Quite the reverse. And it will without a doubt decrease the degree to which applicants have mastered a professional knowledge base or engaged in supervised practice through student teaching.
It is a very bad idea and will do further damage to students in this state.
So you are saying that now, teachers are only in it for the money? They used to do it because they were dedicated to the students and the process. Could the teachers unions blinded them from the facts?
Thank God on this Memorial Day weekend that our military serves others based on their own sacrifice, rather than pay alone.
College graduates these days are loaded up with loan debt, and they have astronomically inflated tuition fees to look forward to in educating their own children. That is a reality created by the much-vaunted operations of the free market, by treating education as a commodity, and by the relationships between loan peddlers in the financial industry and our government.
Last time I checked the military was a profession that could be entered straight from high school — or, if you undergo officer training, the military academies are tuition free and provide stipends to enrollees.
Unless your idea is to make teachers’ college educations free and to provide government-sponsored cost-of-living stipends to support them while they get their degrees, the “compare & contrast” story provided does not apply.
Response to tinkering:
Allowing school districts to train teachers is informed public policy and it is absolutely predictable that it will lead to greater academic gains. The negative coefficient for a masters degree is an absolute indictment of our current teacher education system. When something is damaging results, you should get rid of it – immediately, immediately.
Well, all kidding aside, I disagree on the premise. The only people with appropriate college education likely to give up their private sector jobs for teaching are ones who really care about teaching and will likely do well.
The exception may be some failures who managed to get a college degree but can’t make it in the real world and want the salary (meager though it is) and benefits of being a teacher.
I ask all of you who think this is a great idea to send your children to a school taught by this new pool of teachers, thats all. If we had had this kind of teacher under HT Sanchez, who co-wrote an article suggesting this very thing with the voucher queen, and HIS district, TUSD, had been allowed to train people with a BA or a BS to be teachers, we would have even more of his minions who mindlessly follow his lead than we have now. He paid close attention to training all of the new principals he brought on, and that hasn’t necessarily brought bucketloads of good news to the district. Highlighting loyalty over credentials (even his own!) is not a good leadership strategy and slowly but surely kills the institution. Given how long it will take to clear the deadwood of the district out–that is, the folks, starting at the Board level, who are awfully good followers but miserable leaders–that would probably be educational malpractice towards our students and fatal for the district.
Response to jhuppent@hotmail.com:
“I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. CIRCUMSTANCES (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.” — Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France
As Betts Putnam-Hidalgo, who knows the local circumstances in TUSD very well, points out, this new policy on teacher qualifications would not have had good effects if implemented, given the CIRCUMSTANCES in this district, a district she has observed closely for more than a decade, a district which serves close to 50,000 students in Southern Arizona. The CIRCUMSTANCES in a district of TUSD’s size and regional impact should by itself rule out the policy’s across-the-board application in this state. But even in higher functioning public districts with more active, empowered, and highly educated parent populations — districts where parents would have an easier time recognizing and taking issue with the grave problems that will develop with teacher incompetence and effects on student learning under this policy — it is not advisable to entrust these districts with teacher training. They do not have the financial resources available to develop the mentoring programs, professional development time, and advisory faculty that would be needed. You can’t just ask teachers already responsible for the academic development of a cohort of students to take teacher education on as another responsibility of their already inadvisably overtasked, gravely underpaid profession. Nor can you ask even affluent parents to raise more supplementary funding when they are already fundraising in support of reasonable class sizes and essential supplies for schools.
Arizona has become a veritable Swiftian Laputa of ignorant, abstract policy theories that show no knowledge whatsoever of conditions on the ground in the institutions where they will be implemented.
As conditions continue to deteriorate, it’s a mistake for people with dependent children to assume that valid education must necessarily be delivered through public institutions in all the states in the wealthiest, most “advanced” (?) country in the world. State-level mad-scientist-style regulatory negligence and ignorant tinkering with our education systems has brought us to a place where the schools in some states, including Arizona, are in absolutely atrocious shape. They will only get worse with the downright depraved policies (results-based funding, the destruction of teacher credentialing requirements) which state level leaders continue, with no wisdom and no foresight, to concoct in their “meth lab of democracy” in Phoenix. (Jon Stewart hit the nail on the head in describing the character of their operations in 2010. And they’re still at it, with the academic preparation of the next generation as their focused target now.)
Regarding districts training teachers. Yes, theoretically the districts (really, the school sites) have the people to train new teachers far better than educational colleges. But, the districts, their staff, and school staff are already overburdened and have no time, money, nor other resources to conduct training. For the most part, neither side of that debate has intention to train teachers nor teach kids, as that requires the public to support such efforts with time, money and parenting. Mr. Safier, the politicians he detracts, and most all leadership of school districts do represent the public–making noise to enable citizens to make-believe they are active instead of passive, and continue to pass the buck to district employees, both white-collar and blue-collar, who do actual work.