Don’t Settle for Teachers with Patchwork Credentials

When you visit your doctor’s office, his diplomas, his specializations and his license to practice medicine in California are on display. You know a good deal about his education and training just from looking at his wall. In your attorney’s office, her wall also yields information about her professional preparation and admittance to the bar.

But when you visit your child’s teacher, you have no idea about his professional preparation or his license to teach. What he majored in in college may have nothing to do with the subjects he is teaching.

Parents are concerned that they are in the dark about information concerning the training of those who are instructing their children. We know that some teachers are holding “emergency” credentials and haven’t met the preparation requirements to teach. Do we know which of our children’s teachers are unprepared but are placed in classrooms anyway as “emergency” teachers?

School officials and board members know. Why not parents and the public?

Do we know about the math teacher who wasn’t a math major and teaches from his memory of his early schooling? Math, English and history are required subjects in the middle and high schools, but many teachers do not have the professional preparation for the subjects they are “teaching.” These serious lapses are connected with the poor achievement of students.

All children deserve the opportunity for learning that begins with having a true professional in the classroom, not an “emergency” teacher.

We hear the demand for smaller classes and the need for still more teachers. Will this mean more unqualified teachers? No one should be hired as a teacher until he or she is properly prepared professionally with courses on how children learn, on motivation and on subject matter, including how to teach reading in the earliest grades.

The problem may not be in how teachers are prepared for the profession, but in how so many are allowed to teach without such preparation. It comes from the obvious economic fact that the supply of trained teachers is not equal to the demand for them, yet still we must staff our classrooms. In most professions like medicine, law or engineering, the lack of supply does not allow “emergency” people to practice. Scarcity drives up salaries and benefits and thus attracts applicants.

In education, scarcity results in “emergency” teachers acting like regular professionals and salaries don’t rise despite the scarcity.

There must come a time when starting teachers’ salaries will be at the level of beginning lawyers or newly minted MBAs, when for each teaching position there are dozens of qualified applicants. School officials will select from an applicant pool of those most suited for their schools. Scarcity of teachers should not downgrade the quality of the profession or result in unqualified people in classrooms.

How do we get from here to there? Like everything else, it’s a matter of economics. If we want something badly enough, if it’s important and we don’t have enough of it, we must pay for it.