abcte teachers

ABCTE teachers are a pretty amazing and independent group and it is always gratifying to meet them. This week we issued our 2,000th ABCTE certification to Heather Herd of Branson, Missouri who received her certification in math. A former controller, she is currently substitute teaching and will soon begin looking for a full-time teaching position.

Here at the iNACOL Virtual Schools Symposium and it is THE highest energy education conference I have ever been to.

So I am sitting at a reception last night talking to some teachers and I decided to let them know about ABCTE. They chuckled and said that they knew about ABCTE because that is how they became teachers in a virtual school.

How gratifying to find two amazing teachers who came through our program on the cutting edge of education innovation, helping students achieve their dreams.

I was pondering what to write about for our Friday blog when I received the email below from on of our scholarship recipients. ABCTE has a Transition to Teaching grant which provides a full scholarship through our program. This is why we fight so hard for alternative teacher certification programs:

Today is the day for ABCTE, we are officially on our own. It was about four years ago that I became the President and things were definitely not as rosy. We had lost our grant in Congress and we had to run around working to get our funding back in the spending bill. The press was not kind to us because of some issues with our board and it had been a while since a new state had accepted us.

It happens every June here at ABCTE. I get yelled at because people fail their exams and are in danger of losing their jobs. About 40% of our candidates respond to our surveys that they are currently working in education. A full 20% are actually the teacher of record and they came in on an emergency license or some other license. Because of their situation, they now have until June 30th or July 31st to complete their ABCTE program or they cannot teach next year.

Birmingham, Alabama took a very strange step last week. They decided to continue to hire teachers from the Philippines even though Baldwin County used this same route a few years ago and it didn’t turn out so hot. And they are recruiting overseas in spite of the fact that so many people in this country have lost their jobs.

If you are not annoyed, you are not paying attention. This should be the new bumper sticker of all in education – especially all of us who work in teaching.

Here is a report from ETS that is just stunning to me -- the percentage of 8th grade math students on free and reduced lunch whose teachers left before the end of the school is year is 67%.

Alert the Journal of Anecdotal Evidence! We have proof that ABCTE Teachers dramatically increase student achievement. Our sample size of one, Kelly Bow, an ABCTE teacher who teaches math in an Idaho middle school was able to accomplish the following:

One of the best ways to illustrate the inspiring work ABCTE teachers are doing is by letting them tell the stories themselves. We’ve been doing this in the Meet Our Teachers section of our website with written profiles and we recently launched an ABCTE YouTube channel where we’ve started posting video profiles of our teachers.

Last night Governor Brad Henry of Oklahoma signed SB582 into law allowing ABCTE teachers to teach in Oklahoma. This is the 9th state that now accepts ABCTE teachers and the unanimous passage of this bill in the Oklahoma House says some pretty great things about our program.
1. The content we have added to the program makes it easier for states to accept our teachers
2. The data we have gathered is compelling evidence that our teachers are doing well in the classroom
3. Alternative certification just isn’t so radical anymore