America has an excellent higher education system, from great community colleges to incredible State four-year universities. Yet primary and secondary school, not so much. Students have long performed poorly on tests compared with students from many industrialized countries.
The usual response to this deficiency is to throw money at the problem, but that rarely if ever works, and it is not supported by evidence. Funding per student has been rising sharply for decades, resulting in lower class size, but the results don’t seem to show much success.
A good education requires good teachers. We can try to do so by raising teachers’ salaries, but this strategy also seems to fail, partly because higher incomes go to both good teachers and bad, giving bad teachers as much incentive as good ones to become and remain teachers.
How about better screening and being more selective in choosing candidates? Every state requires that teachers be certified. It would seem that setting higher certification standards for teachers allow school systems to hire better ones.
This is a fail also. First, more stringent certification standards do little to keep out bad teachers. Second, such standards deter excellent prospects from entering teaching.
Despite much research, nobody can say what skills, qualities, or training good teachers need. Candidates may be tested for their mastery of the materials, but not for their ability to help students learn, much less to inspire students, build relationships with them, or illuminate issues in rich ways.
In reality, researchers find little difference between teachers with or without a certificate. Allowing genuine alternatives to certification does not hurt the quality of learning (and even can improve it, some studies suggest). It also makes it easier to find more minority and male teachers, a goal many school districts still need to achieve.
Licensing does not keep the unsuited out of teaching, but it deters the well-suited from becoming teachers. If we want schools to hire better teachers, we should expand, not contract, the pool from which schools may draw. To do that, we need to lower, not raise, the costs of entering the pool. Licensing (or worse, raising “standards”) requires months or years of additional study, increasing the costs of becoming a teacher. There are so many great career alternatives, top candidates may choose them just to avoid the cost, tedium, and hassle of getting licensed.
Requiring teachers to be licensed backfires not only by reducing the average competence of the pool. It also creates teacher shortages, especially in chronically understaffed subjects like science and math, in poor communities, and in schools with high proportions of minority students.
School administrators will always complain that the problem is with the budget, however licensing barriers are the real culprits.
Let’s face it, the incumbents love licensing. They love it because it reduces competition and maintains their status. These rules come from licensing boards commonly dominated by the guild and serve the guild’s interests, not the interests of the children. How many stupid people with a PhD in Education have we all come across? Quite a few (if not all), and they are decimating our schools.
Of course, corrupt teachers unions support stiff certification requirements also. Go figure.
We are so committed to the idea of teacher certification that eliminating it may be impossible. But in fact, much education is already managed without licensing. American higher education is the best in the world, yet university faculty members are not certified to teach. Instead, they are driven by quality–any college that develops a reputation for a weak faculty will struggle to attract students and the tuition they pay. Private schools are also not required to hire certified teachers. This gives them an advantage that should not be limited to schools only the wealthy can afford.
In Virginia public schools, Richard Feynman could not teach physics and Steve Wozniak could not teach computer engineering because they lack certification.
For many years, Americans have paid more but have gotten a sub-par K-12 education. Abolishing certification requirements would eliminate the onerous costs of certification, and would bring more capable people into the field. It’s time to go after quality individuals that understand that it’s not about time off, but that real education is about encouragement, dialogue, mutual discovery, intellectual voyages, trust, and listening. Instead of 12 years of abuse and beat downs, a prison-like environment where kids get no encouragement at all in their life, let us move towards a realization of how much of a hunger there is for that, and how effective it is to do it, to remind kids that there’s more to them than they think.
To remove all the rottenness inside, change has to come from outside.
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