Teachers are the heart of a school, and state policymakers have a responsibility to ensure schools have the teachers they need. But for students to get the educators they deserve, the best and brightest need access to the profession, and they need to be compensated accordingly.
However, one particular factor has an inordinate effect on who can enter the teaching profession: state certification. Unfortunately, contemporary teacher certification not only leaves much to be desired but is a huge contributor to the growing staffing crisis facing schools.
Most states require prospective teachers to take years of coursework and student teaching as a prerequisite for entering the profession. This process ends up costing tens of thousands of dollars and requiring thousands of hours to complete. Once teachers eventually earn their state certification, state laws restrict teachers to very specific grade levels and subject areas, pigeonholing educators at a time when schools need the flexibility to provide a rich educational experience for students. While this unnecessary specialization of the profession may serve the needs of powerful national teachers unions, it does little to help local communities find much-needed educators.
Sadly, much of the education coursework required by certification laws is, at best, ineffective. Because these “ed school” courses often have very little to do with the content teachers must pass on to their students, it’s unsurprising so few school leaders consider this coursework to be effective in preparing teachers to do their work.
According to the most recent study on the subject, a mere 13% of principals and just 7% of superintendents believe certification guarantees a teacher “has what it takes” to be an effective teacher. More than half of principals and superintendents believe teacher certification ensures “only a minimum of skills.” Another study reports only 38% of classroom teachers who recently graduated from schools of education “feel prepared” to enter the classroom for the first time.
What’s worse is that these teacher preparation courses often push a divisive, ideological agenda inconsistent with the priorities and values of parents and local communities. For example, the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, a highly influential national organization that helps shape teacher education policy in this country, insists upon the “integral role educator preparation programs play in advancing scholarly work on Critical Race Theory.”
But there is a better way.
State law should permit school leaders to hire and train teachers in a manner they determine so long as candidates have earned a bachelor’s degree from an accredited undergraduate institution and have passed a criminal background check. Schools should be encouraged to provide new teachers with on-site training on basic teaching techniques, classroom management practices, assessment and test design, lesson planning, and effectively communicating with parents.
Schools should also be encouraged to assign excellent veteran teachers to serve as mentors to these newer teachers during their first two years. These mentors should observe their mentees in their classroom and meet regularly to review lesson plans and assignments and offer regular feedback. And finally, states should encourage school leaders to compensate mentors for their mentorship of new teachers, thus rewarding and incentivizing the very best educators to stay in the profession as classroom teachers and mentors.
Contemporary teacher staffing laws discourage and bar highly qualified individuals from entering the field, and these policies ultimately prevent schools from hiring and keeping the teachers they need. Giving local school leaders greater control over who is qualified to teach in local schools will increase the number of people willing to apply for teaching positions and make these positions more competitive, thus providing an alternative to the controlled public education environment largely monopolized by unions.
The best time to enact these proposals was years ago before the current teacher staffing crisis made it overtly apparent just how flawed the current educational regime truly is. The next best time is today.
For the sake of the current and future generations of young students, I hope we act soon.
Daniel Coupland is an education professor and the chairman of the education department at Hillsdale College.
