Some New Teachers Are Called ‘Unqualified’ : Uncredentialed Group Finds Itself in Middle of an Educational Fire Fight

Jacqueline Chanda was ebullient. She had survived the first day of school. Ann Kawahara was disappointed and downcast. She’d have to retake a test before she could walk into a classroom.

Their contrasting moods this week reflected the beginning of a new school year. But they are not students; they are teachers--albeit with a twist.

Chanda and Kawahara are two of an expanding group of teachers and teacher hopefuls who--among other things--sold insurance, collected back rent, taught in Africa, went to law school, worked for an attorney or with the handicapped before they decided to become teachers.

Teacher Shortage

Now, almost overnight, they’ve been hired by the second biggest school district in the country, Los Angeles. And with less than a week of the school year gone, they’ve already landed in the middle of an educational fire fight--a shoot-out over drafting “unqualified” people to fill the teacher gap in public schools.

It’s done in school districts all across the country--including New York City and Texas--where the teacher shortage has become severe. But few places have received as much attention as the Los Angeles Unified School District for hiring college graduates without degrees in education to teach while they earn credentials through emergency programs. This year about 1,200 of the system’s 2,500 new teachers don’t have regular credentials. That’s why the district was singled out and blasted by the National Education Assn., the nation’s largest teachers union, two weeks ago.

The association and other critics see these newcomers to the classrooms as the latest wave in an invasion of threats to the teaching profession, which they claim has already been seriously hurt by lowered prestige, low morale, low pay and war-zone conditions in many schools.

They also charge that widespread use of emergency teachers is a hypocritical response to the vocal demands for increased educational quality from parents and politicians over the last few years.

Defense of Practice

Defenders of the practice argue that it’s better to staff more classrooms than to pack more students into already overcrowded classrooms, that it’s impossible to improve educational quality until teaching vacancies are filled and that on-the-job training may be as good as an education credential.

Whoever’s doing the talking, it’s clear that the emergency credential issue is a passionate and explosive mixture of bureaucratic, professional and public interests. Hardly anyone, it seems, has an unvested interest in attacking or defending the practice. But nearly everyone involved has an opinion and is willing to talk--at length.

Ironically, there’s little hard information on the impact of emergency teachers on Los Angeles schools. For instance, it’s not known how many from previous years have stayed in education or how many simply have used the positions to heal wounded pocketbooks and move on. And no one seems to have definite proof whether these quick-fix teachers are, overall, a help or a harm.

The picture should become clearer about this time next year when the Los Angeles district and the California teacher credentialing commission complete a joint study comparing the performance of credentialed and non-credentialed teachers.

The hiring of non-certified teachers “probably has some adverse impact but we don’t know the nature of it,” said David Wright, the credentialing commission’s coordinator of planning and research.

In addition, The Times will follow six of these new teachers through the school year, reporting at intervals on how they’re faring. Besides Chanda, 35, who returned to this country from Zambia where she taught earlier this year, and Kawahara, 25, a 1984 graduate of UCLA who worked with the handicapped at the Special Olympics, they are former insurance underwriter and salesman Howard Barnett, 34, property manager John McVay, 32, and 1983 UC Berkeley graduate Patricia Saragosa, 24, who worked for an attorney. (Both Barnett and McVay said they’ll be taking pay cuts as beginning teachers earning a salary of about $19,500.) The sixth, law school graduate Fred Mitchell, 32, began teaching at Miramonte, a year-round elementary school in South-Central Los Angeles earlier this summer.

Fulfillment of a Dream

All six are college graduates with liberal arts degrees, while two, Chanda and Mitchell, have advanced degrees. All hope to make it as elementary school teachers. All completed Joint Venture, a voluntary, unpaid three-week program of job-training offered by the school district. All said they went into teaching because they were dissatisfied with their jobs or careers or wanted more fulfilling work. And they were unanimously optimistic that they will make the skeptics eat their words by surviving and flourishing on the long march to next spring.

For instance, Barnett shrugged off criticism from the NEA and others. “It appears to me they were saying teachers weren’t adequately prepared when they walked in,” he said. “(But) if you have the ambition, the enthusiasm, the patience and the talent to work with kids, I believe you can overcome the lack of experience.”

Saragosa echoed Barnett. “In just a few months we’ll know whether we’re cut out for this,” she said. “I don’t consider us a threat to anyone else or a threat to the system of credentialing because all of us are going to go for that credential.”

Even though he’ll be earning less, McVay figures that teaching won’t be as rough as trying to collect overdue rent. He and his family “were barely making it on what I made before, but to me that’s a problem separate from teaching altogether,” he said. “I almost come here (to school) to get away from thinking about that. I can’t say it’s a vacation but I have a sense of fulfillment here that I didn’t have in the other job.”

Even though he’s getting into teaching relatively late in life, Mitchell, a former social worker and a graduate of Harvard University and Columbia University law school, said his career change marks the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

Growing up in western Tennessee, Mitchell recalled, “My parents were teachers. Almost all of the adults I knew as a child were teachers so it was kind of natural that I would see myself in that role when I grew up. But whenever I talked about it, I got no encouragement from them. They always said, ‘No you don’t want to do that.’ ”

Because he has taught for a few weeks, Mitchell said he knows the demands of the job. “It is really draining,” he said. “I enjoy it a lot, I get a good feeling from the kids. But I never had a conception of how demanding it would be. I never realized that I would be doing it just about every waking minute and having very little time to sleep or do anything else. . . .

Of the 1,200, new teachers in Los Angeles who don’t have regular credentials, many have taught in other states and districts, are teaching subjects outside their specialties or have some other previous experience in schools, officials said.

But about 500 to 600, like Mitchell, have never taught before and have little or no background in education. Today, perhaps 2,500 classroom teachers in the Los Angeles system, or nearly 10% of all classroom teachers, started teaching with less than full credentials.

It’s those 600 or so most recent additions who are the biggest worry to groups such as the National Education Assn., the Los Angeles teachers union, education experts and some California education officials.

School officials seem particularly upset by accusations that its uncredentialed teachers are hired “by desperate teacher recruiters,” as NEA president Mary Hatwood Futrell charged at a recent press conference. Not so, they say, explaining that this year’s new teachers were screened from a pool of about 8,000 applicants and all have passed a state proficiency test.

The test was Ann Kawahara’s Waterloo. She failed the reading comprehension section of the basic skills test that all teachers must pass, she said. Until she takes the test again in about a month, Kawahara said she’ll probably work as a teacher’s aide.

Daniel Lara, a district staff development adviser, rejected the NEA’s charges. “I think the catch phrase that concerned me was ‘off the street people,’ which gave the public the image that if somebody were walking and breathing we were interviewing them,” he said, noting that he is an NEA member. “We were not desperate (for applicants) and we were not out beating the bushes.”

Lara stressed that emergency teachers were also screened for intangibles as well as minimum requirements. “We’re looking for someone who’s interested in working with students, someone who has a positive attitude, meaning that they’re willing to put in some long hours,” he explained.

School officials also note that this year Los Angeles is one of the few big urban districts in the country to completely fill its quota of about 27,000 classroom teachers. They will be working with a student population that has grown by 15,000 to about 580,000, said Robert De Vries, director of staff development. That increase alone, mainly in Latino and Asian areas, created a need for an additional 525 teachers, he said.

School officials tout programs such as Joint Venture as proof that the district isn’t throwing completely unprepared people into the classroom. During the program, which was voluntary, the new recruits trained at year-round schools, observing and helping teach classes. Furthermore, new teachers will have the assistance of senior, or “mentor,” teachers in the schools where they’re assigned, district officials noted.

However, even with such “carrots” as crediting the trainees with half their yearly quota of required education courses, about 100 emergency teachers did not participate in Joint Venture and went into schools without any training at all, De Vries said.

For the foreseeable future the debate is likely to continue. But even in the early days of his new profession, Fred Mitchell can see that there are at least two sides to the issue.

“I think they’re right that ideally somebody like me should not be in the classroom because I have no training,” Mitchell said. “I’m in here completely green and I don’t know what I’m doing. It would be much better if those kids had a teacher who had majored in education and knew a little bit more about teaching than I do. But those people aren’t around. Since they’re not, I’m willing to pitch in and help.”