I first went to Missouri two and a half years ago and knew nothing about the legislative process. I learned the hard way. We didn’t even get our bill out of committee that year. But last Thursday, I was standing next to Governor Matt Blunt as he signed the first bill of this legislative session; a bill to allow ABCTE. This was a hard fought victory to help school districts with their teacher shortages. Once the politics are done, the real work takes over.

Due to the press coverage the Governor received in signing the bill, over 400 Missourians have asked for more information about our alternative certification program and, to date, we have 11 enrollments from Missouri. These include 4 in biology, 1 in physics, 1 in general science, 1 in math and the rest in English. Last year, Missouri Ed schools graduated 5 potential physics teachers for the entire state. We just increased that by 20%. Not bad for a week's work.

I got to meet one of our new potential Missouri teachers. She wanted to teach, but did not have the money to pay tuition for the coursework required by a so-called alternative teacher certification program. She also couldn’t sacrifice the time away from her family.

From the St. Louis Today article about the bill signing: “Heather Meert of Imperial holds a bachelor's degree, a master's degree and credit toward her PhD. She loves working as a substitute teacher for the Fox School District, but it would take a couple of years and thousands of dollars to actually get certified to teach. "I have all this education, and it didn't make sense for me to go back to school," she said.”

Too many people like Heather don’t get into teaching because of the cost and time required for so much coursework. The immediate interest in our program in Missouri demonstrates that a streamlined, yet rigorous, alternative certification can attract great talent into teaching. And the principals who hired our teachers are pretty happy that talent is there.

I had an interesting day in Richmond speaking with education leaders from all over the state. I keep hearing from all around the country that no one can find high school teachers and this was certainly evident in Virginia. It is rapidly reaching crisis level. The irony is that states claim that they don’t want to lower standards and try other alternative ways to recruit, prepare and certify teachers while districts continue to just ignore the current standards to fill critical positions any way they can.

One superintendent said that over 75% of his new high school teachers are coming from alternative routes. It is not what he wants, but it is the only way to staff his schools. These teachers get approximately 5-7 days of induction and then start teaching. This is because he has no high school teachers coming from the ed schools. Yet others were arguing that all new ABCTE teachers should have student teaching.

We also learned that there is a serious lack of experience in our high schools. During one discussion on mentoring, a special education teacher said that she doesn’t have anyone to be a mentor in her schools because no one has over 3 years experience! Even if they do have the experience, teachers have so many extra duties now that they do not want to take on mentoring as well. This sentiment was backed up by all the teachers in the room. They cannot even find retirees to come back and mentor.

States continue to put in place regulations that uphold what they perceive are high standards, while the people who actually have to implement those standards have to circumvent them in order to avoid empty classrooms. Teacher groups continue to fight against alternative methods as hurting the profession while in reality they are actually degrading the teaching profession by increasing the use of long term substitutes and placing untrained “warm bodies” in the classroom.

And every year we wait to do something, the situation going to get much worse.

MO – it stands for Missouri and momentum. We got a little of both yesterday when the Missouri State House voted final approval of Senate Bill 1066 without any new amendments. This means it goes on to the Governor who has shown he is in favor of the bill. This will allow ABCTE to recruit, prepare and certify new teachers for Missouri schools.

A lot of work goes into an effort like this since the Ed Schools don’t want the competition and the NEA is still battling us. Oddly, their fight was to add Praxis to the bill which made no sense since the cut score is so low for Missouri teachers that it really doesn’t help determine anything. But we pressed on and the cooler heads in the legislature agreed.

It is great to see that you can bring common sense solutions to the states and, after a few years, people take action. It takes great legislators, such as our bill sponsors Senator Luanne Ridgeway and Representative Scott Muschany, who are mainly concerned with great schools to get it done.

We continue to move forward in other states and those that need teachers and are tired of excuses will be where we focus our efforts. For now, it is off to Missouri to start recruiting!