Sitting at your college graduation trying to decide what to do next? Why not teach in a public school? You don’t need any education classes. You don’t need to demonstrate subject matter proficiency. Just take off that cap and gown and stow it in the back of your car, drive to the nearest school district and put in an application for a job to teach in your major field. They’re desperate for teachers, you know, so you’ve got a great shot at walking out with an offer. Soon, you’ll have yourself a Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificate and a classroom of your own.
I mean, really, how tough can it be to teach? You were a K-12 student. You spent 13 years watching teachers take roll, say a few words to the class, give an assignment and put the kids to work. You know how it’s done, right? Piece of cake. You can do it too!
Dear Reader: Just to be sure you’re clear on the concept, that second paragraph is pure satire. I spent 30-plus years in the classroom, and it stayed challenging all the way through my last day. Teaching ain’t easy. But the first paragraph is for real. When the recent bill making it easier to get a teaching certificate in Arizona was signed into law by Governor Ducey, it meant that anyone with a baccalaureate degree in a subject taught in a public school can get a Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificate and start teaching right away. According to the law, there are two more ways you can get one of those certificates, potentially without even being a high school graduate. More on that later.
I’ve read what’s been written about the new teacher certification law in other publications, and I’m almost certain the reporters whose work I’ve read misunderstood the legislation. The law has three requirements for obtaining a Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificate, and the articles appear to believe someone needs to fulfill two or more of the requirements to qualify, setting the bar higher than it actually is. I’ve gone through the Conference Engrossed Version of SB 1042 a number of times and read over the Senate Fact Sheet, and it’s clear to me that an applicant only needs to fulfill one of the three to qualify.
Before the list of requirements, the law says:
A person is eligible for a specialized subject matter expert standard teaching certificate pursuant to this subdivision if the person obtains a valid fingerprint clearance card . . . and meets any of the following requirements:
See that word “any” near the end of the passage? In the previous version of the law, the word was “all.” “Any” means you only need to meet one of the three requirements to qualify.
I have to get a little English Teacher-ish when explaining the part of the Senate Fact Sheet relevant to this part of the bill, but I’m an old English teacher, so indulge me. The passage begins,
“[The law] Establishes the following criteria for an individual to obtain a Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificate:”
See the colon at the end of that passage? That signals that a list will follow. And it does — the three requirements separated by semicolons. After the semicolon separating the second and third item is the word “or.” That means all you need is one of the three items; otherwise the word would be “and.” Grammatically, it’s more-or-less the same as a list separated by commas, like, “You have to eat an apple, an orange or a banana.” The “or” means any one of the items will do.
So, here are the three requirements for getting one of the new teaching certificates. Any one of them will do.
(1) You can get the teaching certificate with a baccalaureate, master’s or doctoral degree in a subject taught in public schools.
(2) You can get the teaching certificate with five years of work experience in a field taught in public schools. There’s no degree requirement for this one, so theoretically, you wouldn’t need a baccalaureate degree, or even a high school diploma if you put in the time in the right field.
(3) You can get the teaching certificate if you’ve taught at least three years in an accredited postsecondary institution. That sounds like you would need a college degree, except that accredited postsecondary institutions include vocational or trade schools where a degree may not be required.
(Note: An amendment was proposed saying a baccalaureate degree is a requirement for the certificate, but I didn’t see that language in the bill.)
And remember, you’re never required to take a single education course, ever. Or demonstrate subject matter proficiency, unless your grasp of subject matter is so shoddy, after two years in the classroom, the State Board of Education decides to suspend your certificate.
Welcome to the new, ridiculously low bar Arizona set for teaching in its public schools.
This article appears in May 4-10, 2017.
Studies of long term substitutes show academic gains identical to regular teachers.
Stunningly, the coefficient on a master’s degree in education is negative, meaning that the students of teachers with masters degrees have lower academic gains than teachers with just a bachelor’s degree.
Subject knowledge is the factor most strongly correlated with academic gains of students.
Six months into the job, only 25% of teachers rate the quality of their bachelor’s degree preparation excellent.
A culture of continuous improvement is completely absent from our colleges of education.
We can come back 20 years from now and that number might even be lower.
You and your culture had its chance David.
Fantastic. Nothing against our many wonderful teachers, but lots of professionals I know could teach better than many of the teachers I’ve met. I’m not sure what they teach in all those teaching classes, but most of it seems to have little or no practical application. I think it’s just to get a fancy degree so everyone can feel good about themselves.
Mostly what’s required is intelligence, patience, a willingness to learn, and a love of children – all attributes that education students typically possess. Oh, and it helps to know the subject you’re teaching, something most education graduates don’t.
Professionals could also bring some real world experience into the classroom which would be interesting to students.
Reality bites. Long past due.
Huppenthal – You regularly deride testing as a measure of learning, so when you talk about “academic gains” made by students of various kinds of teachers, credentialed and un-credentialed, what method are you using to measure those gains?
BSLAP – Teaching IS a profession, so your pervasive, condescending contrast of “teachers” with “professionals” makes no sense. The attrition rate in the teaching profession is very high — among those who do the training and receive certification, a large percentage of them leave the profession during the first three years and never return. Some of those leaving, in my experience, are among those most equipped to provide excellent instruction to students. Why do some of the best candidates leave the profession so quickly? In this state, SALARIES that are shockingly low and insufficient to compensate for the amount of time that must be invested, which for most teachers I know is much more than 40 hours per week. LACK OF RESPECT from parents, many of whom think they themselves are “professionals” and teachers are not. WORKING CONDITIONS that undermine your ability to deliver instruction that is meaningful and effective, e.g. for English teachers, too many sections to teach / not enough planning time / class sizes too large to assign and respond to as much writing as students should be asked to do to properly develop in the discipline. And in recent years, increasingly, externally imposed TESTING and ACCOUNTABILITY regimes that demand teaching to the test and make a mockery of what instruction in a good classroom should be.
Reducing credentialing requirements and eliminating the need for teachers to study child development, pedagogy, and methods in the disciplines may make future “teachers” more vulnerable to the purveyors of crap curricula and scripted instruction who would love to profit from massive adoptions of their shoddy materials without any effective push-back from the professionals who are asked to employ this garbage to “teach” students, but it will absolutely not improve services delivered to students. It will further degrade them in a context in which underpaying, undervaluing, and creating toxic working conditions for teachers has already done much to destroy this state’s ability to deliver sound K-12 education.
There’s only one thing left both to good teachers who want to teach responsibly and to young people who want to raise families without having to navigate the degraded, unregulated nightmare K-12 schooling in AZ has become: get the hell out of the state.
Indeed, as I have stated elsewhere, this is just the bill suggested by HT Sanchez and Graham-Keegan in the Daily Star some time last year. Don’t be fooled–that doesn’t make it non-partisan: Sanchez was told by the Board majority that although he was a Republican in Texas he would have to re-register as a Democrat here…..which it seems he never did,(register, that is), or at least he didn’t show up on the rolls, despite how often he showed up in the state house to tell them how to educate our kids. This idea was one of his worst, in my mind. As a once- landscaper, I know exactly how respected one feels when the people who hire you are all sure they can do the job better than you can, and that is the sentiment expressed here. Yeah, sure, excite 38 kids all together in a classroom about learning? And then get them to advance and satisfy expectations for the high stakes standardized testing at the end of the semester? Easy. Right? Everyone who thinks that ought to have to do it (but my child will not be available for your experiment). Will Basis be hiring those teachers, Freuchtendler, Sahuaro or UHS? Its just another nail in the coffin of a profession that should be honored and paid above all others, for it is creating and tending the future.
Response to Remedy:
You miss the subtlety of my concern about testing. Testing is the only way we have of measuring academic gains so we have to refer to it to gain a sense of how the system is working.
However, knowing how well you are doing is different than making test scores the centerpiece of your culture as a school. In 7 years of chairing a school board, I very seldom mentioned test scores and for four of those years, didn’t even have test scores as a part of our performance system. However, I did talk about quality with almost every single breath and we ended up with very high academic gain scores. The very highest quality is what gets you high academic gain scores. Quality is motivated teachers, motivated students and engaged parents. Focusing on test scores helps none of these.
However, repeatedly low academic gain scores is a sign that quality is missing. Look closely beneath the hood and you commonly find a system extremely focused on test scores.
You are right that teaching at its best is an extraordinary skill and that most teachers recognize that education culture as it is can not deliver an environment that will enable them to be their best and they leave, not because of pay but because a lack of job satisfaction.
We have over 1,000 school board members in this state and over 200 superintendents. How many them, right from memory, could tell you the percentage of teachers rating their schools an excellent place to work and be accurate to within 30 percentile points? My guess – less than ten. I have performed that pop quiz numerous times.
The system won’t deliver to teachers what they desperately want and need – excellent support in the classroom.
Private & parochial schools have often considered subject knowledge (not always even with a degree) as a reason to assign teachers to classrooms. There’s plenty of evidence of success. For several years in the 1980s an anthropology graduate led Tucson students in state Latin competitions, and in summer took groups to Italy. She taught at a small, inexpensive parochial school – not an elite private school.
I once heard of an Episcopal school where a woman who had connections to the local Episcopal establishment got a job as a primary grade teacher though she had no degree in education, no teaching experience, and her primary previous work experience was reputed to be as a stewardess for an airline. No doubt there’s nothing more required in teaching children to read than the kinds of skills used to serve beverages and snacks and keep passengers docile on an airplane.
(If you’re not picking up in the sarcasm, you know very little about reading instruction, primary methods, or pedagogy.)
The kinds of abuses that have taken place and continue to take place in private and parochial schools — e.g. hiring unqualified or underqualified relatives and friends of people in the network — may have passed muster with people more concerned about whether other parents were members of the same country club than whether sound methods were used in their child’s classroom, but they shouldn’t be allowed to continue in any school, public or private, any more than we should return to the days, to use a medical analogy, before uniformly sterile procedures were used in operating rooms.
How about if, in authorizing the use of public funds in private schools, we raised credentialing standards in private schools instead of lowering them in public schools? What a concept. But it would never fly in a state like Arizona.
We are doing something different in Arizona. We are deregulating, getting rid of regulations that simply haven’t worked to improve the quality of education.
How will we tell if this experiment is working? The National Assessment of Education (NAEP) progress is widely held as the gold standard for comparing states. So far, so good. RAND, perhaps the nation’s premier think tank, did 3 analyses of NAEP data, ranking the states based on 1990’s NAEP data. Recently, the Urban Institute, using a statistical technique very similar to RAND, ranked Arizona 13th based on 2015 data.
Not good enough, but very much an improvement over the average ranking of 21st by RAND.
The rankings you in this blog and other media, quoting sources like Wallethub, have no scientific foundation at all.
Huppenthal — Are you familiar with Campbell’s Law?
“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
This is very much what any one who has gotten close to publicly funded schools under accountability regimes observes to be going on: the tests used to measure academic merit are distorting and corrupting the educational processes they are intended to monitor. You can’t get away from testing’s effect by having a figure in upper level governance de-emphasizing it. It is in the system, in the ABC ratings, in NCLB, in Race to the Top, in US News and World Report rankings, etc., ad nauseam. People ignorant of education need some means to put gold stars on some programs and to stigmatize and shame others, most often those serving the disadvantaged. Administrators looking to accumulate resume-able accomplishments and / or success stories the media will print to give the public the impression they are “excelling” schools will exploit students and degrade what happens in their classrooms in order to get their data where they need it to be. It is not the case that good scores are a sign that “quality” (motivated teachers and students, engaged parents) is firmly in place. They are often a sure sign that the program in question games the system and disregards more valuable educational experiences for relentless test-prep regimes. Cf. Basis, cf. University High School.
On another topic, if you think Arizona teachers are leaving the field “not because of pay but because of job satisfaction,” you are not talking to enough teachers. Pay is a large component of our retention and vacancy problems in this state. Compare teacher retention and vacancy rates in other states with those in Arizona. All states are dealing with some of the same problems relating to destructive accountability regimes, but most states have nowhere near the problem retaining teachers and filling teaching positions that we do here. Why? Some states, like Vermont, pay teachers in a way that makes sense considering the difficulty of their work and the value it contributes to the community.
Yes, state level leadership is “doing something different in Arizona.” It is different from what works, different from what produces an educated citizenry, and different from what builds the health of the community and the economy. But they will keep doing it, no doubt, until someone stops them by voting better leadership in. Bargaining with them and collaborating with their debauched schemes TUSD-style and Darland-style is not a winning strategy.
I actually agree wholeheartedly with your first two paragraphs. My observation and conclusions from the data exactly. It is obvious to me that schools that focus intensely on test scores don’t seem to be making progress academically. There are potential exceptions to this rule. However, look at the paradox. Test scores reveal that focusing on test scores doesn’t work to improve academic results.
However, test scores reveal that focusing on quality increases test scores.
In the end, measurement helps inform policy. However, policy discussions remain at the kindergarten level so to speak. Of what good is it to be sane in an insane asylum?
The largely untested, unregulated portion of the spectrum i.e. kindergarten through 4th grade is improving academic results much much faster than the highly tested, accountability intense portion of the spectrum – 4th through 8th grade. In fact, the productivity of 4th through 8th grade appears to be plunging.
There are heavy caveats to this observation however. All day kindergarten has been proven to have a delayed negative reaction. In other words it boosts results in k through 3rd grade but by the end of 8th grade, full day kindergartners are a full one-tenth of a standard deviation behind half day kindergartners and full day kindergartners appear to be on a permanently negative arc relative to half day kindergartners. You can see a complete analysis of this on the RAND website.
A good part of Finland’s success against us might be due to a delayed school start.
Education is a complex business.
Your simple assertion that what Arizona is doing doesn’t work is belied by the facts:
Since Arizona started on the school choice path in 1993, murders by juveniles have dropped from 70 to 7 despite a tripling in our at-risk population. A recent, scholarly, Urban Institute study ranked Arizona schools 13th in the nation in academics. Local districts like Chandler Unified, Mesa, and Vail have seen the percentage of parents grading their childs school an A rise from 38% in the 1990s to 75% currently (Westgroup). Every scientific indicator suggests that Arizona is on the right path.
The media rankings based on things like Wallet Hub lack a scientific foundation. Compare us with Wisconsin for example. Our Black 8th graders outscore their Black 8th graders, decisively. Our Hispanic 8th graders outscore their Hispanics and our whites outscore their whites. Yet, Wallethub rates them higher than us academically. Wallethub is not scientific, they are policy morons, they and their “statistics” are a joke.
This blog honors all things that lead to more expensive government. But, we know that more expensive government destroys jobs and job creation. Running extremely frugal government is the most powerful indicator for job creation. The most frugal states in the nation double the job creation of the high spenders.
What is needed is GOOD government: neither too small nor too big, efficient, effectively serving the common good, ensuring high quality service delivery, and protecting citizens from abuse.
Unfortunately, in this state the Rs seem to want NO government, and the Ds seem to want to continue excusing BAD government. We have no broad-based, widely recognized political party or advocacy group focused on exercising the citizenship oversight and public participation skills necessary to keep government institutions honest and responsive.
More’s the pity.
Response to R’s and D’s get it wrong.
I just completely disagree. Two weeks ago, I had to go to MVD to get a new Title to a truck I was selling. While I was in the legislature, I put in untold hours working to get better MVD service. Eventually, we got it down to an average wait time of less than 20 minutes. We put in comprehensive systems to improve service and speed. Not bad, when I first visited MVD offices in 1993, there were people in there with sleeping bags. Average wait time – 3 hours.
I was dreading going for two reasons, I didn’t want to witness the degradation I was certain I was going to observe. MVD has suffered 10 consecutive budget cuts.
It was a stunning surprise. The office had put in a new wrinkle. When I came into MVD, there was a “cart girl.” She had every form a person could possibly need. She was also able to check as to whether a person had all their paperwork in order.
From the time my hand hit the door to open till the door closed behind me – 16 minutes. The customer focus was palpable. It actually added value to my day everyone was so pleasant.
Who would have dreamed it? MVD – Motor Vehicle Department.
A friend of mine had just come back from New York. You know Nirvana for the liberals who inhabit this blog. She took a disabled friend of hers to MVD in New York. What she described was exactly what I observed in 1992 in Arizona. After waiting 3 hours, she demand special consideration based on the disabled status of her friend and got it. Before leaving, she witnessed one poor soul cursing the employees after having been sent from MVD to Social Security to MVD back to Social Security each time having waited 3 to 5 hours and still not having his issue involved.
Governor Ducey takes pride in working toward excellent service. He actually cares about it, MVD is living proof of it. You just don’t need to have expensive government to have effective government, MVD is proof.
John, the irony in your comment is that the MVD never worked better than when Phoenix car dealer Ev Mecham was Governor. As soon as the democrats regained power, it fell into total disarray.
And that is so hard for the public to hear.
The MVD I use in Pima County is not working well. It seems to have some of the same problems TUSD does with inefficiency and inadequately instructed staff.
Part of good government has to do with OVERSIGHT and STANDARDS. You don’t get good government by slashing budgets and deregulating. A free-for-all, unsurprisingly, does not protect constituents from abuse. State level leaders cut funds, peel back regulation, and don’t even bother to enforce the constituent-protective laws that remain on the books.
Arizona is going to hell in a hand basket and all we get from those responsible is self-congratulation and “data” that is supposed to prove that we are living in the best of all possible worlds, when in fact we can see from our direct experience that many functions government should perform are disappearing or being degraded through mismanagement to the point where they might as well have disappeared.
Will the next election solve our problems? Seems unlikely when the choice is between more-of-same Phoenix Republicans and those affiliated with our Southern Arizona Democratic dysfunctions.
Sigh.
Arizona Going to Hell in a Handbasket
You say that we can see from direct experience that Arizona is going to hell in a handbasket. Yet, we have school district that have rigorous systems for measuring parent’s direct experience.
Those parents don’t agree with you. It is quite likely that our ratings of school quality by parents are the highest in the nation. We have school districts triple the national average.
You say that Pima County MVD is not doing well. What, specifically was your experience there? How long did you wait? Were you able to complete your transaction in one visit? If not, did you get the info you needed to complete your transaction?
What we have is a lamentation orchestra. Instead of focusing on the true mission, developing the next generation, we have many people who work to create a culture of lamentation built around a false mission of maximizing pensions.
What is our mission? To develop our children or to maximize the pensions of exiting adults? All the commentary on this blog suggests that the true mission of the district system is to maximize pensions.
jhuppent@hotmail.com:
You fail to distinguish between two distinct points of view:
1) Safier-style political-machine-feeding “all our problems will be solved if we just increase funding to public district schools and cut off funding to and support of alternative schools”
and
2) the repeatedly expressed opinion that funding should only be increased — and charters and vouchers permitted — with improved oversight mechanisms that ensure increased funding and increased choice will be managed in ways that benefit students and protect constituents from abuse
The results of parent satisfaction surveys, as has been pointed out before, are interesting, but most parents are not professional educators and their satisfaction with a school in no way guarantees that quality education is necessarily being delivered there.
What we have in Arizona education is not a lamentation orchestra — what we have is a peculiarly toxic version of the Wild West on both sides of the political aisle. It is a bipartisan culture of self-serving irresponsibility that, on the one side, lazily and irrationally assumes the “invisible hand” will effectively accomplish what only careful, tedious, systematic quality-control oversight can actually accomplish, and, on the other side, sloppily begs more funding while resisting and disparaging any concern with how that funding is actually applied. Neither approach works to provide high quality publicly funded education.
The situation was correctly diagnosed above. The one effective remedy left to those who want to raise and educate children responsibly: leave the state of Arizona.