alternative teacher certification

Mike Petrilli over at Flypaper wonders if NCLB has created a new breed of education leaders by looking at superintendents of large school districts.

It got me thinking about the other dramatic shift that seems to have been caused by NCLB through the highly qualified teacher requirement. Over the last 18 months, 5 different state directors of teacher certification have suddenly retired: Kansas, DC, Louisiana, Colorado and Georgia.

Great article about the shortage of math and science teachers even affecting suburban schools now. These are schools that normally have a waiting list for jobs and now they can't find math and science teachers. Why is that?

Not so shocking revelation from the Cleveland Plain Dealer on colleges of education. To me, it is amazing that this issue has not outraged more parents and students. (Note that there are always exceptions and there are many schools working to improve and all people who generalize are jerks). We do not have a lot of exceptional Education schools in the US and we cannot have a world class teaching workforce if we aren’t more selective of who gets in the classroom.

The Missouri Legislative session ended last Friday. It was not a great session. Only 147 bills passed out of 1,954 filed. That means they only passed 7.5% of the bills that were filed and the ABCTE bill was one of them. Pretty amazing and our thanks goes out to the Missouri Chamber, some outstanding legislators plus Kent Gaines and Nikki Strong who helped us get this done.

There is a great report on alternative teacher certification from the Center for American Progress. They get many things right in this article and are pushing lawmakers/decision-makres to think outside the university in order to get the numbers of teachers we need in this country.

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.

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.

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.