Lack of Experience Also Cited : Many Teachers Fill Jobs Without Proper Training

The bell rings, as it always does, at 12:31 p.m. at Sun Valley Junior High School. Period five has just begun. But, at this predominantly Latino public school, the unexpected is about to happen.

Standing alone in front of an English class is a blond, blue-eyed young woman. Her name is Penny Rogers--”Ms. Rogers” to her students.

Rogers, by all rights, should not be doing what she has been asked to do--teach English lessons to students who do not speak English. She has had neither the special training required to teach her native tongue as a second language nor does she know the languages that her students speak. When she began teaching three years ago, she had not even had a course in education.

Up to now, Rogers has been able to cope, partly because, by all accounts, she is such a gifted and dedicated teacher. And she has had the assistance of a Spanish-speaking aide who can translate the lessons for most of the students, even if he can be of no help to students in the class who speak Vietnamese or Korean.

Today, however, the Spanish-speaking aide is gone. He has left Sun Valley for a “better” job: as a farm worker. The hourly rate for loading grapes on a truck may not be as high, he explained to Rogers, but given the number of hours a week he could work, he surely had a better chance of supporting his family.

And so Rogers is left all alone, struggling this day to teach against odds that seem almost insurmountable.

Rogers--who has since married and changed her name to Freeman--is working in an industry that not only allows but expects its workers to do jobs for which they have neither the training nor the experience.

In 1985, the American Federation of Teachers and the Council for Basic Education estimated that at least 10% of the nation’s 2 million teachers were teaching subjects for which they were not legally certified--a situation that the AFT said “constitutes a scandal in the making.”

In some parts of the country, including California, the scandal has already become a reality.

The most visible sign of trouble is the language barrier that Rogers faces in her classroom every day.

By law, students who do not speak English fluently are to be taught by teachers who are either bilingual or are trained as “language development specialists.” But there are simply not enough of those teachers to go around. As a result, schools such as Sun Valley are forced to make do with what they have.

Problem Not Limited

What’s more, the problem is not limited to bilingual education. After years of glut, public high schools all across America now say they do not have enough chemistry teachers, math teachers, social studies teachers--even regular English teachers.

In elementary schools, where teachers are expected to be versed in a whole range of subjects, the shortcomings are often more difficult to detect but no less serious. Many elementary school teachers, for example, have graduated from college with only one class in science and mathematics, which, some experts say, may account for the comparatively low scores of American students in scientific and technical subjects.

In California, the shortfall of adequately trained schoolteachers is significant.

Of the state’s 185,000 schoolteachers, 6,262 are working under what are known as “emergency credentials,” meaning that they have not completed--and in some cases, not even begun--the professional training legally required to teach in California’s public schools. And those numbers do not include substitutes who are hired on a day-to-day basis, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which compiles these figures annually.

Further, according to a recent survey that the commission prepared for the California Legislature, at least 8% of the teachers who are fully certified are “misassigned”--that is, they are teaching subjects other than those for which they have met the basic legal requirements. Health teachers are asked to take over chemistry classes. Psychology majors are assigned to history classes. And virtually anyone who has had more than one college course in mathematics is likely to be tapped to teach geometry or calculus classes.

While many of the individuals teaching outside their area of training may well be qualified to teach the classes to which they have been assigned, the fact is that “we do not know if they are . . . nor do we have any control over what they are doing,” said Richard K. Mastain, executive secretary of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

In Los Angeles, the problem is as acute as anywhere in the nation.

Over the last several years, the Los Angeles Unified School District reports, 40% to 50% of its new hires have been emergency-credentialed teachers.

Hundreds of other teachers have also been hired, according to district officials, under an “alternative teacher-certification process.” Although the teachers in the program have been screened on the basis of standardized test performances and interviews, the only training they have had before being assigned their own classes is a three-week crash course in classroom management.

The numbers of unqualified or under-qualified teachers have dropped somewhat this year but, district officials say, only because school enrollments did not grow as much as expected.

“The proverbial story of the football coach (who knows nothing but football) teaching math in a small town in the Midwest is becoming a reality even in the most sophisticated schools in urban areas,” said Patrick M. Callan, executive director of the Education Commission of the States.

F. Louise Grindstaff, professor of education at California State University at Northridge, likens the situation to a medical program: Giving untrained people teaching credentials, even emergency credentials, is “like giving a person an MD who has never treated a patient.”

Recognizing the seriousness of the problem, the California Legislature, which sets many of the state’s standards for teacher preparation, has stiffened its requirements for teacher certification in recent years.

For years, for example, the state did not even require college degrees of its substitute teachers. Beginning just last January, a bachelor’s degree became a prerequisite for temporary certification as a substitute.

Individuals who were issued long-term emergency certificates and thus allowed to teach their own classes on a full-time basis were allowed to renew those permits year after year without any further demands made of them. Now, however, to get an emergency credential a person must first pass the California Basic Educational Skills Test and then be admitted to a university teacher-preparation program and complete at least six semester units toward a regular credential each year.

By 1990, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing hopes to do away with emergency credentials altogether. Then, every individual who wants to teach in the public schools would be required to first obtain an undergraduate degree, then take a fifth year of specialized course work in education and teach only under supervision during that year of preparation.

Some policy-makers say the tougher standards may well be realized, given a recent surge in enrollment in teaching programs. Other experts, however, doubt whether standards will get tougher because demand for public school teachers is growing even faster than enrollment.

Efforts in recent years to improve public schools have conspired with a boom of school-age children and a skyrocketing immigrant population to create an almost unprecedented demand for schoolteachers in California, according to a 1986 analysis by a group of university researchers, headed by James W. Guthrie, professor of education at UC Berkeley.

Assuming that nothing changes--that student-teacher ratios remain constant, that emergency credentials continue to be issued and that teachers continue to teach outside their fields of expertise--between 12,000 and 35,000 more teachers will be needed in California in 1989 than will be available. By 1994, the figures will jump to between 40,000 and 83,000.

If hoped-for improvements in the system are made--if class sizes are reduced, if emergency credentials are eliminated and if teachers are restricted to their fields of expertise--then the shortfall will increase to between 80,000 and 94,000 by 1989 and between 120,000 and 167,000 by 1994-95, the researchers project.

Although other estimates may vary, almost all analysts who have looked at the supply and demand figures agree: The problem will get worse before it gets better.

Moreover, the shortages will continue to plague the schools most in need of qualified teachers.

Worst Facilities

As it is now, the least-qualified teachers--the emergency teachers who are often not fully trained--are assigned to the least desirable schools in their communities: that is, schools with the lowest test scores, the worst facilities, the highest crime rates.

There are communities in which such conditions would seem intolerable, said Callan of the Education Commission of the States. “Parents would either demand that their children get fully trained teachers--or they would remove their children from the schools.”

But the parents of students in schools that are most likely to get emergency-credentialed teachers have neither the financial resources nor the political clout to make such demands. Indeed, many are immigrants and cannot even vote.

For the teachers who begin their careers with neither experience nor training, the obstacles are often overwhelming, and only the tough and dedicated survive the experience. But it is often difficult to predict who the survivors will be.

Rogers is probably not one that many people would have bet on.

The mother of two small children who worked as a TV journalist and a pastry chef, she came to California from South Dakota in 1983. While in California she tried her hand at being a bartender.

“That certainly wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life,” she said. “I suppose it was inevitable that I became a teacher. My mother was a teacher, my grandmother was a teacher. Everyone in my family, aunts, uncles.”

For Rogers, getting a job as a teacher was the easiest part. All she had to do was sign up.

But trying to prepare for and teach classes while taking a full load of university courses at night and during summers for a master’s degree as well as to get certified was not such an easy process.

And even after she finished her own schooling with a full credential in English and a master’s in education from Cal State Northridge, she still found herself teaching classes for which she had no training.

“Here I am teaching the alphabet to kids who don’t know English and many of whom have never before been in a school anywhere in the world,” she said.

Despite some obvious drawbacks of this approach to manning the state’s public schools, many teachers who have followed the emergency teaching route are not so sure they are any worse off than teachers who have been trained more traditionally.

Traditional Route

“I am really glad I didn’t do it the traditional way,” Rogers said. “A lot of courses you have to take to become a teacher would have been wasted if I had taken them before I was actually working in a classroom.”

Fred Beerstein, one of Roger’s colleagues who teachers science at Sun Valley, agreed. “There’s a whole lot--discipline, techniques of teaching your subject--that you simply can’t learn without being in the classroom.”

Beerstein tells the story of a man who wanted to learn to play the violin. The man went to the concert hall, listened attentively and then went home and tried to start playing. To his astonishment, he found that he could not do it. “He was terrible. His response to that was: ‘Next time, I’ll sit closer.’

“The point is,” Beerstein said, “you need to do it in order to learn how to do it. The same is true for teaching.”

Joseph Lovett, another teacher at Sun Valley, said he could not have afforded to go into teaching unless he was paid while he was being trained.

Moreover, he argues, in many ways, all teachers, no matter what their academic backgrounds, are unprepared for what they find in the public school classroom today.

There are no courses, he said, to teach someone how to deal with kids who are “substance users, kids who are beaten, kids who come from broken homes, kids who have just come into this country, kids who have bad attitudes toward school, parents who have bad attitudes toward school.”

In fact, many university education professors say they do try to prepare students for the practical realities of standing in front of a classroom, but the task sometimes seems hopeless.

State Requirements

The California Legislature, for example, has required that all teachers who want to be fully credentialed take at least one course in ethnic studies or minority relations.

Yet, as Helen LeMaire, an experienced teacher who has taught in both black ghetto schools and Latino barrio schools, put it: “How do you teach cultural sensitivity? Surely not through book learning. You have to live it. You have to experience it.”

The number of untrained teachers in the system already--and anticipation of more to come--has put a strain on the university schools of education. At many, night classes bulge with emergency-trained teachers working toward full credentials.

At the Los Angeles campus of the California State University, for example, officials estimate that the proportion of emergency credential teachers enrolled in education classes has grown from about 5% to 80% in the last few years.

Their presence has forced a rethinking of the education curriculum, university officials say. These are students who are already teaching and want to know how to cope with today’s crisis, how to plan tomorrow’s lesson. They are not interested in theory. They are not interested in how it was done. Or how it might be done in some ideal setting. They are interested in practicality.

As one university educator put it: “They’re into coping. It’s not the way we want it. It’s probably not the best way to train teachers. But in some ways it’s good. It’s certainly made us honest.”

Daniel Freeman, Rogers’ husband, said: “What they teach you in ed schools is not always relevant.” He is an emergency-trained teacher at San Fernando High School. “They have wonderful equipment at the universities--computers, books, filmstrips. . . . Yet what you find in the schools is that kids are doing research papers with 1956 science papers. You have to figure out how to cope with that.”

In her brief training program before being thrown into a classroom all on her own, Rogers found “everything went wrong. There were not enough textbooks. The overhead projector broke. I just cried.”

Yet she credits her school with helping her cope.

Unlike most public schools, Sun Valley Junior High School does not reserve the easiest classes and the best equipment as rewards for the experienced teachers.

Instead, it divides the tough classes among all the teachers, experienced and inexperienced alike, provides its own special training program for new hires and uses a “buddy” system in which veteran teachers and retired teachers advise and help younger teachers with everything from lesson plans to discipline crises. Even administrators are on alert.

“We check the faces of teachers as they walk by and we send out help when it looks like they are in trouble,” said Lynda Markham, a mentor teacher who is in charge of all new teachers at Sun Valley.

“Unlike some places,” she said, “we do our best to make certain this is not baptism by fire.”

“We have done what we have done out of necessity,” explained Jeanne Hon, Sun Valley’s principal who was named Principal of the Year in 1987 by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.

“Over the last few years, we’ve hired at least 70 new teachers--50 of them without prior experience. . . . Penny (Rogers) is certainly not alone.

“It’s a shame to have to put someone like Penny in even one ESL (English as a Second Language) class. But what you do when you get someone with as much raw talent as she has is you give them at least some tough assignments and let them run with them. And you just do whatever you can to make sure they don’t trip and fall flat on their faces.”

“Like it or not,” Grindstaff concluded, “this is a model for what will be happening in teacher training in the years to come.

“At least here,” she said, “Sun Valley does not leave the dregs to the uninitiated.”

REQUIREMENTS FOR A TEACHING CREDENTIAL

To become a credentialed teacher in California requires nine steps:

1. A bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university

2. Completion of an approved teacher-training program (usually 24-27 units of study and supervised student teaching)

3. Verification of subject matter knowledge (elementary school teachers must demonstrate facility in a range of subjects either by majoring in liberal arts or passing a battery of core tests on the National Teachers Examination; secondary school teachers must demonstrate in-depth knowledge of a single subject, either by majoring in that subject or by passing a subject matter test on the National Teachers Examination)

4. A course in reading or a passing grade on state reading examination

5. A course on the U.S. Constitution

6. A passing score on the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST)

7. A fifth year of study beyond the baccalaureate

8. A course in teaching students with learning handicaps

9. A course in health problems of children or adolescents