Getting Teachers Up to Speed

There are 21,000 teachers in California public school classrooms working under emergency permits, uncredentialed by the state. In the Los Angeles Unified School District alone, of 3,622 new hires this school year, only 27% are fully credentialed, 59% are on emergency permits and 14% are enrolled in a formal intern program of teacher preparation.

The number of uncredentialed elementary school teachers in California has nearly doubled since the beginning of the state’s class size reduction initiative in 1996. Some of these teachers are missing only a few credits for full certification; others have not even begun their teacher education course work.

The impact on California of large numbers of unprepared teachers is daunting. If teacher quality is questionable, we can expect poor student achievement.

Why are we in this mess?

We are on a collision course in California between a very good policy to reduce class size and a rapidly growing student population. In addition to underprepared teachers, factor in the large number of teachers reaching retirement age and an attrition rate of about 50% of teachers during their first five years of teaching, and you can see the scope of the problem.

Local school districts clearly want to hire fully credentialed teachers, and they do an admirable job recruiting from a limited pool of available teachers. But they do not have the luxury of turning away students as do private schools; consequently, they must find adults for each classroom.

“California has both the best prepared teachers in the nation and the worst prepared,” says Jeannie L. Oakes, assistant dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. The standards for obtaining a teaching credential in California are among the highest in the nation. Thus the odds are that if a teacher is fully credentialed in this state, he or she will be a good teacher. But what about the others?

How is California going to achieve the goal of having a properly trained teacher in every classroom?

We must take several immediate measures:

* Allocate additional funds for teacher preparation at our colleges and universities. The universities can then work cooperatively with expert teachers in local districts to staff such credential classes (as is being done in the DELTA--for Design for Excellence Linking Teaching and Achievement--Teacher Preparation and Professional Development Collaborative) to produce substantial numbers of highly trained professionals in a relatively short period of time.

* Fund an assessment program for teachers with out-of-state credentials. These teachers must be brought into compliance with California standards.

* Establish partnerships between our colleges and universities and public schools. We need to provide continuing support for new teachers so they will succeed and remain in teaching. The Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment System, which currently supports 17,000 beginning teachers, and the DELTA collaborative, which involves four Cal State campuses and three school districts, are examples of models that should be expanded with additional funding.

California must intensify its efforts to provide well trained teachers for its burgeoning public school population. Our children’s education is too important to trust to teachers ill-prepared for their task.