by AFT President Sandra Feldman
August 1998

Officials should stop
hiring unqualified new
teachers -- now.

Everyone claims to care about teacher quality. But you have to wonder when the people in charge of maintaining teacher-quality standards are so often willing to undercut them.

Look at the recent comedy of errors in Massachusetts. Officials there finally decided to give a qualifying test for new teachers. It wasn't rigorous, but the state at least set a decent passing mark (77 percent). Passing this kind of basic test doesn't guarantee that someone will be a good teacher, but it will tell you if the person can spell or write or do basic math.

When 59 percent of these prospective teachers didn't make the grade, state officials' response was to lower the passing score. Then, when there was a public outcry (which included AFT leaders), the state flip-flopped and reinstated the original passing score.

"Labor Day Specials"

So Massachusetts K-12 students were saved from having some new teachers who can't write a coherent paragraph and who think the word for what you do with a ruler is spelled "messure." But what does this incident tell you about how fragile the standards for becoming a teacher are--and how ready officials are to lower them?

I'm not just talking about Massachusetts, either. In districts where the conditions are rough and the pay is low--in other words, districts serving our poorest and neediest children, the ones who need the best teachers--schools often end up getting the least qualified new teachers. (We call them "Labor Day Specials.") They are hired with "emergency credentials" or misassigned to classes they weren't trained to teach.

And this problem will get worse. Many of the skilled and experienced teachers now in our schools will soon be retiring. That means hiring two million new teachers over the next decade. Where will they come from and how capable will they be? Will we see a continued lowering of standards as district officials scramble to fill those positions?

Advocates of "alternative certification" say the solution is easy. We should get rid of teacher standards altogether because the "bureaucratic red tape" involved in certification turns off many qualified people--eager young college graduates, brilliant historians, retirees from the military, and, my personal favorite, geniuses like Albert Einstein.

Now, I fully support good alternative certification programs that bring talented career-changers into teaching, or young graduates like the ones in Teach for America. But people who enter teaching by one of these avenues are often clueless about how to teach, so they need to be supervised by expert teachers. And if they decide to make teaching their career, they should demonstrate that they can teach--just like other would-be teachers. Knowing your subject is essential, but you also have to know how to put it across to kids.

But those who think that programs like these will take care of the teacher-quality problem are not looking at the realities of the situation. In districts where attracting new teachers is already a chronic problem, "alternative" means "emergency." It means lowering standards, allowing any warm body to teach. The sad truth is, there aren't enough Einsteins or former military officers--or even idealistic young graduates--who want to become public school teachers.

So let's get serious about teacher standards. State and local education authorities should stop all emergency credentialling and out-of-field teaching, starting now. And they should allow parents whose children are in classrooms with "emergency" teachers to transfer their children to another classroom or public school with qualified teachers.

Make the Crisis Visible

Officials will insist that this will cause a teacher shortage crisis. But we already have a crisis in districts where lowering teacher standards is common; this will simply make the crisis visible. And if a bigger shortage of teachers results, the AFT stands ready to help.

Our locals can negotiate financial incentives that will encourage certified teachers to take on extra classes or become cross-certified in fields where there's a shortage. Incentives could also persuade some accomplished teachers who are retiring to stay on. Or retirees could teach part time. If there's a will, we will find the ways.

In the long run, policymakers have to face the deeper problem of attracting top-notch college graduates into teaching--salaries that value teaching would be a good start. Right now, we have to insist that the people in charge don't allow just anyone to teach our children. It doesn't take an Einstein to see the wisdom of that.