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The Fast Track for Becoming a Teacher

Ohanian Comment: Funny how
Lisa Graham Keegan, CEO of the Education Leaders Council, spins education courses as "courses you don't need." It will be interesting to see what the drop out rate of these newly minted teachers is.

When the economy turned sour in Erie, Pa., as elsewhere, Jack Armbruster lost his job selling office furniture. Hoping for a job teaching art or history in the local public schools, he went back to college and earned a bachelor's degree in liberal arts.

He soon learned that wasn't enough.

Armbruster, 51, was told he would need another 60 credits, including six months of student teaching -- in all, another two years.

"You're 51 years old, you just can't say, like you're 19 or 20, 'I'm going to go to school for a year or two,'" says Armbruster, who is married with two sons.

This fall, he's putting his hopes in a new program that could lead to a teaching job -- without all the coursework. Pennsylvania will soon become the first state to allow school districts to hire teachers who may never have set foot in a public school classroom.

Prospective teachers need only possess a college degree, submit to an FBI background check and pass two written tests, to be given for the first time on Friday: one in their subject and one on teaching methods.

That's it. No education courses. Even student teaching can wait until you're in the classroom.

''You don't have to take courses you don't need,'' says Lisa Graham Keegan, CEO of the Education Leaders Council, a conservative Washington think tank and co-sponsor of the Passport to Teaching program, which aims to streamline the teacher certification process to get more qualified candidates into public school classrooms.

New teachers needed

Not every area has teacher shortages, and Pennsylvania's is no worse than many others. But enrollment and demographic trends nationwide suggest that public schools will need hundreds of thousands of new teachers over the next decade.

In their push to fill the need, states and school districts have spent 20 years developing alternative routes to certifying teachers. Some allow candidates to condense their coursework into a few short months and then work in the classroom under supervision. Most states still require teachers to complete a year of student teaching and several semesters of coursework before getting state certification.

Passport compresses the coursework even further -- literally between the covers of a book. It allows candidates to learn how to teach -- educational pedagogy -- by reading about it. For now, it's online, but soon it'll be in a book from Kaplan, the education publisher.

Could it make teachers colleges a thing of the past?

Keegan says there's still room for traditional teacher-preparation programs, but she and others say Passport will reduce barriers that keep new college graduates and career-switchers from becoming teachers. They also expect other states to follow Pennsylvania's lead and approve the certificate, allowing for a ''portable'' credential that teachers can use anywhere.

Keegan, formerly Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, says 17 other states are considering the certification. By next August, she expects that at least 25 states will accept the Passport tests as an alternative to their state certification tests.

But opponents say Passport won't prepare teachers for the rigors of real-life classrooms.

''Would you want a doctor cutting on you who had never dealt with a live patient before?'' says Tim Dedman, a senior policy analyst for the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union.

''This is not a game that we're playing here. Kids are coming to school less prepared than they ever have,'' he says. ''Schools are being asked to deal with more societal problems, and yet we're talking about lowering the requirements for what it takes to actually teach these children? That doesn't make any sense.''

The program may have its critics, but it also has the blessing of U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige. A $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education created the project in 2001.

Paige and other conservatives have criticized teachers colleges, saying they don't prepare enough teachers with solid backgrounds in subjects like math, science, history and foreign languages.

A more traditional approach

But the Passport program also seeks to focus new teachers on a more traditional approach. It asks them, for instance, to teach reading primarily through phonics, sacrificing more exploratory methods for so-called ''direct instruction,'' a back-to-basics approach that often uses highly scripted, repetitive lessons. These lessons are sometimes called ''teacher-proof'' because nearly anyone can teach them.

In most cases, teachers are expected to dispense knowledge rather than ask students to learn through experimentation or trial and error. Critics, including professors at teachers colleges, say the more creative ''constructivist'' approach is what most students need and what gives most teachers job satisfaction, meaning they'll stay in education longer.

Emphasis on test scores

But that approach is falling out of favor. President Bush's No Child Left Behind reform law, which focuses on improving children's basic skills, requires that students nationwide pass standardized tests in math and reading. Indeed, Passport requires that teachers be judged almost solely by the standardized test scores of their students.

''They're ahead of the curve in terms of that reality,'' says Erie superintendent James Barker.

But some note the Passport tests themselves have yet to pass muster in other states and have a long way to go to be considered a national standard. ''I would hope state legislatures wouldn't put them into practice until the validity and reliability of the content has been confirmed,'' says Alex Wohl of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation's second-largest union. ''You would want it evaluated at a national level before you move forward.''

Passport supporters like to note that Albert Einstein may have been a genius, but he wouldn't have been allowed to teach middle school math without two years in teachers college.

Credentials aren't enough

That's a bit of an oversimplification, says Paul Houston, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. He learned in the 1960s that academic credentials aren't enough, when he supervised Ivy League graduates during their first year of teaching. ''They were brilliant academically, and they were just a disaster in the classroom,'' he says.

Houston supports alternative certification, but calls the Passport program ''a little scary.''

''You can't be quite so cavalier about putting people in classrooms without giving them some exposure and support,'' he says.

Pennsylvania has added extra requirements to the Passport tests, insisting that teachers who want to be certified under the program undergo a lengthy probation period in which they're supervised by a master teacher.

''I think you have to have strong knowledge content and pedagogy,'' says Barker.

Keegan says Passport candidates who pass the teaching methods test will know their stuff. But she believes learning how to teach can wait until a teacher is in the classroom -- it's the subject-matter knowledge that can't come later.

''Handling 29 sixth-graders, those things can be taught in concept but never really learned until you get there,'' she says.


— Greg Tp[[p
Shortcut to the classroom Streamlined program's aim: A faster track for teachers
USA Today
2003-07-21
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20030821/5428474s.htm

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