I’ve written a number of posts about SB 1042, which created a new Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificate. But recently I realized I was so wrapped up in the details of the bill, I missed the big picture, which is that, thanks to the new law, education courses, teacher training and student teaching are now optional for public school teachers. You could even say they’re even a waste of time and money. Teaching in Arizona has been officially de-professionalized. People can now get a standard teaching certificate with nothing more than a bachelors degree in a subject taught in middle or high school. Or if they’ve worked in a relevant field for five years, all they need is a high school diploma or a GED, or less. If a school district is willing to hire them, they immediately become full-fledged teachers who can work until retirement without ever taking an education class or having their subject matter proficiency formally assessed.
The standard definition of “profession” is a paid occupation that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification. Doctors fit that definition. So do lawyers. Teachers also make the cut when they’re required to take relevant coursework and go through training in the field of education along with demonstrating a proficiency in the subject matter they will be teaching. But when all Arizona teachers need is a bachelors degree, or a high school diploma or GED plus some work experience, they no longer qualify as professionals.
But we had to do something to combat teacher shortages, right? That’s what Ducey and Republican state legislators tell us: necessity was the mother of the new certification rules. The problem is, that’s simply not true. The mother of SB 1042 is the conservative desire to devalue, degrade and dismantle public education.
Before the new law, Arizona’s public schools already were able to hire teachers with minimal education and training if they needed to. People could teach with nothing more than a bachelors degree by getting an Emergency Teaching Certificate, which is good for a year and can be renewed by taking a few education courses. People could also teach with nothing more than a high school diploma or a GED by getting an Emergency Substitute Certificate, though with that certificate they can only teach 120 days, not a full school year. It can be renewed with a little coursework in any subject.
That means Arizona already had a low bar and an even lower bar for gaining the right to teach a classroom full of kids in a public school. But before SB 1042, the state made it clear it didn’t like the idea. The certificates were for emergencies only (“In case of emergency, break with best practices”). Before hiring emergency teachers, districts had to demonstrate they had tried to find more qualified people. And the emergency hires were short termers. If they wanted to stay longer, they could take some coursework, then they could return for another year as short termers.
But now, courtesy of SB 1042, the low and lower bars are the new normal. Qualifications that were previously suitable only for emergencies turn people into instant, full fledged, credentialed teachers. The Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificate is the Un-credential. It’s a certificate granting full teaching status for nothing. Little kids get certificates like that when they participate in “everyone gets an award” races. If you give your teenage babysitter a Child Management Certificate when she or he walks through your front door, it would mean as much. Yet Arizona’s Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificate is equal to a standard teaching certificate people earn by going through a teacher preparation program, passing subject matter and professional knowledge exams and teaching for two years.
Arizona didn’t invent the idea of de-professionalizing the teaching profession. It’s been a conservative goal for years. Every year a few more alternative teacher credentialing programs, which are generally shorter and less demanding than the standard teacher education programs, are added to the ways teachers can get their credentials. Sometimes articles about the value of the alternate programs sneak in a paragraph near the end asking the question, “Really, why do we need teaching credentials at all?” Gradually, the idea has moved to the forefront, until now, you can read an article in Forbes magazine titled, Teacher Certification Makes Public School Education Worse, Not Better. It came out last week. Expect more commentary of that kind to push its way up the media ladder toward mainstream news outlets until we start hearing “very serious people” saying the best way to fix our “failing schools” is to get rid of teaching credentials—and get rid of those pesky, teacher-protecting unions while we’re at it.
This article appears in Jul 27 – Aug 2, 2017.
“The mother of SB 1042 is the conservative desire to devalue, degrade and dismantle public education.”
Be still my heart but doesn’t this qualify as a conspiracy theory?
David, you have hit the nail on the head!
If this catches on you can forget trying to get companies to relocate to Arizona, no matter what incentives you give them, and you might be encouraging companies that are already here to think about moving to a state that values education for their employees’ children and for future employees.
Of course, it will sure make it easier to cut all kinds of programs when the only remaining businesses in Arizona are private prisons, Border Patrol operations and construction of the Trump Wall.
All of the Republicans in the state legislature and the congress of the U.S. are doing great with a very limited education which home-schooling could provide. The main objective for Republicans across this country is to take every program and department of state and federal government s and privatize them which allows public money to go to private persons, usually other Republicans that will funnel that money back into electing more Republicans. The planning to monopolize governments started after Richard Nixon resigned in discrace and Republican think-tanks have been meeting since that time to achieve the goals of their platform,ie; small central government, low taxes, privatize every part of the federal government, restrictions on individuals that are granted by the Constitution. All conservative governments across the globe are repressive and some of them are murderous. Hitler was a liberal until he gained complete control and then he became an ultra conservative.
$72,000,000,000.00 Education Funding in California. How did students results compare to the rest of the nation? 46th.
https://calmatters.org/articles/how-much-has-californias-education-spending-grown-in-last-5-years/
CA Legislature is loaded with liberals and a liberal governor.
Arizona is loaded with conservative assholes and a conservative asshole governor.
Yet AZ scores even lower than CA.
Not the best argument now is it Mumford?
Sounds like a tempest in a tea cup. With pay so low and teaching being such a tough profession, the only people who will do this will be people who are very motivated to teach and will probably do a great job for that reason.
I have to agree. There are some great teachers out there that have made it their career. It reads like a hit piece by a union, gasping for survival. NEA always offered up scary scenarios that did not come to fruition. Would love to see it go back in time to the point where government workers were not allowed to unionize. That in itself would allow them to take their union dues home as pay.
What is our goal? What achievement will bring the greatest esteem and job satisfaction to our teachers? Creating an artificial construct of laws that prevent entry into the profession?
Or, to maximize academic gains, motivation and character of our students so that they can be successful in life?
The long-term studies in those states that now track academic gains student by student and class by class show that certified teachers are only marginally better than uncertified teachers.
From that curve you can draw a simple theoretical conclusion – if school districts can gain unlimited access to the upper half of the uncertified curve, academic gains for the nation will go up as much as 25%.
The best and the brightest of education culture have been at it for years. The result? Academic productivity of our schools is down 15% since 2000.
Allowing school districts to set their own employment policies not only will not end the world as we know it, it is likely and predictable that it will result in better outcomes for our students. And, that in turn will result in greater job satisfaction for teachers.
Where are there schools with uncertified teachers that are comparable to schools with certified teachers in sufficient quantities and of significant length to provide long-term results? And what does “long-term” imply? How many years, judged by what? As usual with Huppenthal, his statements are questionable at best, and probably false at worst.
You have a number of states for example Florida and North Carolina where they have detailed data stretching for many years.
We will soon have a comparable data base in Arizona through the teacher course connection. We have a very large sample of long term substitutes and emergency teachers.
It actually doesn’t take a lot of years, just a large sample.
The particular study that I read came from an analysis in Florida. It was almost a dead heat, but there was a large standard deviation on both curves. That large standard deviation points to the potential to access a large pool of effective teachers who aren’t currently allowed access to the classroom just because of credentialing.
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Over 45% of long term substitutes had higher academic gains than 50% of certified teachers.
A side benefit of allowing this unfettered access is that it would send a wake up call to the Colleges of Education. When reviewing quality surveys at the Arizona Department of Education, I found that only 25% of teachers rated the quality of their preparation excellent. This was a static number.
At the Department of Education, our excellence rating was improving at the rate of seven percentile points a year. Our Arizona Universities overall were improving at the rate of one percentile point a year and I wasn’t seeing any improvement at all in the teacher rating of their college education.
Consider the increasing exodus of teachers from their profession aligned with far fewer college students intending to enter the field (a labor shortage) in tandem with the acknowledged low quality and standards of teacher preparation courses (a readiness issue). These explain the dynamics behind S.B. 1042 here and similar legislation under consideration in other states.
The political argument in favor of S.B.1042 type legislation appears to be: If holes need to be plugged, any warm body will do.
These are untenable problems with a suggested solution akin to sending 10 years olds into battle as inevitable defeat looms. Mastery of subject matter IS critical to teaching successfully. Mentored experiences and knowledge of how students learn IS critical to teaching success and being able to broaden students’ horizons while igniting their desire to continue on to more demanding lessons.
Until traditional models of teacher preparation are disrupted and replaced, and the teaching “profession” becomes a highly paid, respected, admirable pursuit, nothing will change. The questions are how to attract the best students into well designed and validated teacher preparation programs, how to nurture them in the field and how to fund teaching jobs that pay salaries commensurate with other professions.
The center cannot hold. We are running out of cannon fodder.
Mumford P. Where did you get your ranking number? If not in the link you supplied. Here’s one that actually does. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/05/cali…
jhuppent@hotmail.com. Do you have any non-biased sources for your claims? Or are you just pitching out numbers to back up your desire to cripple public education? And where is that Florida study? Here’s one that disagrees (assuming your’s exists): thttps://www.teachingquality.org/sites/default/files/11_doescertificationmatter.pdf
Hi,
A false statement –
“Yet Arizona’s Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificate is equal to a standard teaching certificate people earn by going through a teacher preparation program, passing subject matter and professional knowledge exams and teaching for two years”
If it were true why then only a few of the jobs offered it as a minimum requirement and none as the only …
This one doesn’t and note the preferred requirements ….
https://www.google.com/search?q=tusd+jobs&…
Been tracking here all summer …
https://www.google.com/search?q=tusd+jobs&…
Response to Retrorv
Your study doesn’t disagree with me- read it carefully. In your study, Darling-Hammond is disagreeing with a prior study which, using NELS data, found that certified teachers did not outperform non-certified teachers in the areas of mathematics and science.
This is the key sentence in the entire study:
When experience was controlled, both education degrees and
levels of experience had positive but smaller influences on student achievement (page 21).
Yes, as a group, certified teachers outperform non-certified teachers by a smidgen – that’s what I stated in my post above.
But, almost half of non-certified teachers outperform almost half of certified teachers. The variance is quite large so there are large gains to be had by allowing districts freedom to choose the best.
The districts with the overwhelming majority of our students are well equipped to sort this out.
This debate, whether certified teachers outperform non-certified teachers, is important. If the research reported by Mr. Huppenthal is reliable (I believe it is) and there is little difference, what are to believe?
In my estimation, we need to look hard at both the teacher certification/degree programs and the students who enter and graduate ostensibly prepared to begin teaching. A hint: take a long look at preparation of the teaching cadres in countries that are succeeding. Entrance into the teacher profession is heavily screened admitting high achieving students into demanding programs with significant field experience and assigned mentors (master teachers). The pay scale is attractive to students wanting to work in the field, not seen as a cross to bear or a base to build on with additional part-time work. Teachers in these countries are not autonomous but are heavily involved in decision-making in their schools and professional organization. Essentially, the opposite of what teachers in this country experience.
So, if certified teachers here fare not much better than their counterparts, it just could be that our teacher training and certification mills are working with average material in a virtual vacuum while expected to produce able practitioners willing to work for a pittance. What could possibly go wrong?
Response to Mumford P and Retrov on California’s ranking
The RAND corporation did three major studies in the 90’s and very early 2000s which ranked the states. These studies used NAEP data and six different census variables to very carefully control for demographics, family income, family marital status, etc.
California schools finished dead last in all three studies while Arizona ranked 21st in the most recent of the three (2002 data) and 19th and 30th in the two earlier studies.
Just recently, Matthew Hingus of the Urban Institute did what amounts to an update of the RAND studies using 2015 NAEP data.
In his ranking, Arizona ranked 13th and California ranked 47th.
Hawaii, the state with one school district and 19% of parents rating their child’s school a “D” or “F” ranked dead last.
The short answer is, “Yes.”
Following up on Rick Spanier’s comment above, our teaching colleges aren’t just working with “average” material – they are working with below average material, if the relevant population is “college undergraduates”. Education majors rank near the bottom of the college undergraduate population in terms of standardized test score and in terms of high school grades. See https://qz.com/334926/your-college-major-i…. This lead former Heritage analyst Jason Richwine to conclude that Americans school teachers are actually overcompensated when evaluated relative to jobs staffed by workers similar average IQs. See http://www.heritage.org/education/report/a….
For the record, I think that American school teachers do a fine job with the students that they have. But if I believed that American schools were deficient in some way, I would be looking for ways to get teachers into the classroom with more intellectual horsepower than the people working there now. The Arizona experiment might be a good place to start that effort.