by Jonathan Butcher
Goldwater Institute
Part of being a savvy customer is recognizing and interpreting signals when shopping. Usually this is simple enough: Valet parking at a restaurant can be a signal that prices on the menu will be steep, and a clothing store located beside such a restaurant usually indicates trendy fashions and high price tags.
Likewise, employers look for resume signals to prescreen job applicants, such as attendance at an esteemed college or work experience at a reputable firm. But research indicates that, in the teaching profession, completion of a standard certification program doesn’t always signal competency in the classroom. In fact, teacher certification does not have a strong relationship with student achievement — effective teachers are better identified after having some classroom experience.
Alternative teacher certifications have gained a lot of ground, by 2009, 47 states had adopted some form of alternative certification. But some alternatives are better than others. A study that year found striking differences in the programs.
In those states that had alternative certification routes requiring the applicant to take fewer than 30 credit hours of course work, students between 2003 and 2007 saw greater test-score gains in math and reading than their peers in other states.
In addition, there were more minority teachers in states with effective alternative certification programs. This is a critical finding because of the general shortage of minorities in the profession over the last decade.
Neither standard nor alternative certification programs guarantee teacher excellence, and successful school leaders “understand how to hire teachers that will achieve positive classroom outcomes without having to depend on cumbersome certification processes,” wrote Arizona Board of Education President Jaime Molera in the Arizona Republic earlier this month. Alternative programs provide more ways for talented professionals from all walks of life to enter the teaching workforce.
The University of Arizona has an excellent opportunity to create genuine alternative certification routes with the $1 million in federal grants it received last month to support such programs.
For the benefit of all Arizona students, state policymakers and the university should provide prospective teachers with legitimate alternatives to standard certification requiring less coursework. We should give school leaders more freedom to hire talented individuals and hold both accountable for teacher and student performance.
Jonathan Butcher is education director for the Goldwater Institute.
Learn More:
KOLD News 13: UA getting more than $1 million to help recruit new teachers
Arizona Republic: Educators need tools to help students succeed
Education Next: What Happens When States Have Genuine Alternative Certification?
The current certification isn’t certifying subject competency in the relevent academics, so it’s worthless. The universities and colleges are certifying “process” not substance.
And it should take logically more time to certify a upper level maths teacher for genuine maths competencies or a physics or chemistry level teacher than a first grade teacher.
We should be certifying MATH graduates with ONE semester of teaching skills/classroom organization classes, not certifying graduates with six semesters of teaching skills/classroom organization and one semester of math. Same with all the subjects.
The current crop are expert forms-distribution-and-collection facilitators, but don’t know the subjects they tell the kids to “figure out on your own.”
Some savvy colleges could overhaul their teaching degrees/certificates to traditional skills mastery and their graduates would be snapped up by competitive schools. Hell, they could band together and start their own schools as long as at least one of them took some business administration courses.
Good post. And wanumba is right. There are many good teachers outside of the classroom — doing training (in a business, NGO, or military setting), mentoring colleagues at work, teaching in church, etc. But they could never teach in a government school because they did not jump through the government hoops. As a general rule, government programs tend to focus on following a prescribed process; private enterprise tends to focus on getting results. It always amazes me that many schools expect teachers to effectively teach a subject they have not mastered simply because they (supposedly) have the teaching process down pat.