Charter schools

[Nancy]

I'm finding out that the state of Ohio has much more stringent requirements than many other states for teachers. The teachers coming out of here are very qualified and certainly not in the bottom of any class. We require our charter school teachers to be certified also and now require all teachers of preschoolers to be certified. Our private schools do not require certification but it's not because they feel just an eduaction degree is not good enough, it's because they can't afford to pay the teachers a comparable salary.

I guess we may not have many teaching jobs but the teachers we are producing are very well qualified. At least here "just an education degree" is a pretty darn good thing and not a watered down version of anything.

I've learned that some states have much different requirements for those entrusted to teach our children. I wonder how students in each state would compare if we had a standardized test nationwide instead of each state having their own.

Nancy

 

[Kathy813]

Nancy,

Ohio has a reciprocity agreement honoring the certification of teachers from 41 different states including Georgia and other southeastern states.

I was even more surprised to find that they don't make teachers that started their college coursework before 1987 take the Ohio's state teacher certification tests. When I was researching the reciprocity agreements of many other states when husband was unemployed and I thought we might have to move, most of the other states that had reciprocity agreements still required all incoming teachers to take that state's teacher certification tests.

So their standards can't be all that much different than most states.

~Kathy

 

[Martie]

This IS interesting. Historically, the way this is supposed to work is if you teach young children in elementary school, you should major in el ed, because ANYONE knows what is being taught, it's the how to teach to developing minds that is important. This has always made sense to me--by the way, how DO you teach a child to......? You all may have a very good idea having helped your difficult children etc, but the general population does not.

High school teachers are modeled on the professoriate: namely, the teacher should be an content expert. Of course, we've all met people who know their area, but can't teach at all. by the way, there usually is no instruction in "how to teach" for Ph.D.s who become university instructors. Enter the "methods" courses for high school teachers: the future teacher majors in a subject but is required to take some basic child or adolescent development and "how to teach" the specific subject classes. In many states a course in disabilities is also required due to inclusion.

Currently NCLB favors the second approach, i.e., teachers need to be "highly qualified" and one gets that way by majoring in subject matter.

I do not know how I feel about this because at least in grades K-5, my kids never had a teacher who would have been improved by being a non-education major, although some of them did, and were initially certified at the master's level. They were excellent teachers who majored in el ed.

There has been negative selection for teachers as long as I have been in the field. It will probably get worse as the boomer teachers retire. When the boomer children were in grade school, anyone breathing with a temperature above 98 could teach because there were 40 kids per class and not enough teachers even for that. I was in a Kdg class of 38 kids! I have no idea how the ONE teacher with no aide did it. She was a great teacher and I'm sure majoring in a subject wouldn't have helped but of course, it wouldn't have hurt, either, because it is always better to know more than less. I can't not imagine that was a good experience for any child who was lagging, not able to pay attention, etc. etc. but what was Mrs. Bruce supposed to do with 38 five year olds?

An off-shoot of this debate is, "How do you feel about hiring non-certified native speakers of foreign languages as teacher?" Most states will not allow it, except provisionally. Private schools do it all the time and generally, but not always, offer better foreign language instruction than public schools. On the other hand, being a native speaker of any language does not ensure that a person can teach it to others.

These are tough policy questions and a lot is at stake.

Martie

 

[Nancy]

Kathy, my sister in law has taught schools in several different states including Wisconsin, Ohio, and Maryland and has told me that Ohio's requirements were by far the highest.

I'm not sure I disagree with the reciprocity rules that much because certainly on the job experience should count for something. Hopefully if you did not learn it in the classroom you at least picked much of it up through osmosis. Perhaps what I should have said was that it appears our teachers are more qualified when they first get out of college.

Martie, I agree with you. I believe content knowledge is much more important at the high school level, but at the elementary school age one needs to know how to teach and I'm not sure you get that without education classes. We all complain about teachers who aren't qualfiied to teach our special needs kids and this is one of the reasons.

It appears as though the standards for teachers vary so greatly and perhaps this is why we lag so far behind many other countries in math and science for example. I still go back to my question about test scores. I would be very curious to kow how different states perform given the same standarized test.

It also appears that one can become a teacher by several different methods. I understand one can get a masters in education without having taken a single undergrad education course. You can't do that in other professional fields.

I'm not sure how I feel about the foreign language speaking teacher. I think that for some very specialized subjects, content is more important and perhaps foreign language is one of those. I don't object to having an expert in a certain field come int o teach certain subjects. In my kids' private elementary school they had an artist teach art. She was not a teacher. They also had a spanish speaking mom teach spanish and she was very good. However at the high school level I don't think she would have done as well.

Nancy

 

[Martie]

Nancy,

I never took an education course as an undergrad. I was initially certified at the master's level. I do not think that matters as long as one "learns how to teach" somewhere, at whatever level. It would have been really undesirable for me to repeat undergrad just because I did not expect to teach, ever, LOL, and look what happened.

I meant what I said about professors: I believe I am a good college level instructor because I was a certified Special Education (and h.s. content area) teacher. I just transferred those skills to older students. However, there is no requirement that university faculty know ANYTHING about teaching, and many don't.

I agree grade schools have more flexibility: my kids' el. school had an "artist in residence" for a year who was not certified and that was allowed even in a public school. I think the public h.s. would have been too rigid for that.

Good thread you started!

Martie

 

[svengandhi]

I just came upon this thread and it is fascinating. When I was in college, 30 years ago, my parents BEGGED me to become a teacher, it was steady, I would be in a union, I could retire at age 50, etc. Teaching did not appeal to me, especially since NYC (where I lived) had just gotten done firing 20,000 teachers. I became a lawyer instead.

Forward 25 plus years. My 11th grade daughter wants to teach, elementary ed, possibly reading (one of my sons is dyslexic) and possibly Sped. She is wonderful with kids and although her math skills (due to lead poisoning), she is good enough to teach little kids.

I am encouraging her. My SD starts teachers with just BA's at almost $50K! It took me years of lawyering to make that much. Once she gets tenure after 3 years, the only way they can fire her is if she molests the students or steals money from the SD (the tenured teacher who assaulted my difficult child in grade 6 is still teaching). My SD is known for hiring its own grads to teach here. I on the other hand was recently downsized after 20 plus years at the same company.

All of my female lawyer friends agree with me - if we had it to do over, we'd become teachers and then go to law school at night or after we retired from teaching. As a teacher, you get your summers off and many of my teacher friends work at the very expensive day camps so their kids go for free or they tutor and make a ton of money off the books. The only downside I can see is that my teacher friends can rarely make it to one of their own kids' school activities (although for teachers who live in the district, accomodations are often made here).