States Crack Open the Door to Teachers Without College Degrees — from edweek.org by Madeline Will

Excerpt:

As states brace for the potential for starting the school year with thousands of unfilled teacher vacancies, several are easing certification requirements. But Arizona and Florida have gone one step further by lifting the requirement that teachers hold bachelor’s degrees in certain instances.

From DSC:
You can probably guess where I’m going to go with my comments here…and you’re right.

Teaching is extremely hard. To do it well, one has to have a lot of knowledge and practice. I, for one, would not want to be thrown into the deep end of teaching without a fair amount of background knowledge and experience. 

Even highly experienced teachers can’t do it all. Even they can’t provide a personalized, customized education for 25-30 students at a time — each and every day. Even they can’t address a spectrum of abilities and paces of learning. They are operating within a system whereby the train leaves at specific times and travels at a specific pace and then stops at specific times.

K-12 education in America is a like a quickly moving train that stops for no one.

I hope the experiment works and that it can diversity the profession — and be open to trying different things in different ways — as proponents assert. But I must admit that I’m a bit skeptical here.

I’d rather see the system change than try to make the existing system work with different people. I do like what Tonya Strozier said:

“If we want something different, we’ve got to do something different,” Strozier said.

Which reminds me of what Kelly Niccolls said out this piece from GettingSmart.com:

I’m hopeful for the rebuilding of what can be and for the doors that open for folks with skill sets that otherwise have been ignored or devalued. These skills are what we need now for these new times.

Kelly Niccolls

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