Pinch-Hitters in the Credential Game

Roger Mudd, the former CBS News anchor-turned-college professor and host of the History Channel, once noted a hoary conundrum during a TV documentary on education: Why do so many high school civics teachers have the same first name: “Coach”?

The perception--and to some extent the reality--that almost everyone can qualify to teach civics is widespread. In fact, published data indicate that 46.9% of California’s high school history teachers and 13.3% of its social studies teachers--totaling 60.2% of civics classes--had neither major nor minor in the field they currently teach.

Imagine the outrage at colleges and universities if adult students discovered that more than half of their history and government courses were being taught by professors whose university degrees were actually in English literature, psychology or physical education. And yet public school administrators, whose first priority is a warm body to corral bulging classes, can by law routinely assign secondary teachers to classes outside their disciplines, provided instructors consent and have taken a handful of related college courses or have passed credential subject-proficiency tests that such critics as the nonprofit Education Trust complain are geared for minimal standards.

Unfortunately, although we know the percentage of public-school teachers who did not major or minor in their teaching subjects, cross-referenced statistics that would identify and compare the major of all instructors with each course they teach outside their college field are not collated by education officials.

Administrators contacted at the state Department of Education say this is because the state Education Code focuses on what officials insist is more crucial than a college major--subject authorization on teaching licenses (credentials).

Although few would argue that simply majoring in a subject qualifies someone to teach it, California’s education bureaucracy apparently operates on the equally fallacious, opposite assumption: that the two-year commitment to one subject area during a four-year undergraduate degree program is of secondary importance.

Case in point: Two young historiphobes whom I tutor recently had the same civics instructor at a Glendale-area high school. One student recalled a grand total of two class discussions of the assigned material during the entire semester. The other remembered the teacher--who doubles as a campus coach--frequently talking about sports on the phone during class but lecturing on a social studies topic only once.

No organized debates, no dramatic or journalistic reenactments, no primary sources. Classes, they told me, consisted instead of videos, reading the plodding textbook and answering questions on myriads of work sheets the teacher borrowed from a colleague.

Having worked as a social studies instructor at a public school and known history teachers inspired and otherwise, I doubted that the fellow described had either a deep personal interest or college major in civics, so I looked him up.

Indeed, the instructor told me he actually had been a college English major but was permitted to teach social studies via the credential subject-proficiency test. Why the switch? Because English classes regularly generate hundreds of essays to correct--a drudgery, he noted ruefully, that he prefers to avoid.

An all-too-familiar story: teaching civics not out of academic ardor but because it appears easy and convenient. Is it any wonder that most adolescents learn to despise social studies as a dreary, incomprehensible and generally irrelevant afterthought?

Kids, like the rest of us, crave entertaining presentations of events, ideas and people that lie buried in the often baroque and distant past. Those of us who have committed our college years to studying history are usually more eager and thus more likely to conjure those ghosts from provocative primary sources in creative ways.

Admittedly, civics texts are often god-awful dull, obsolete and, as a recent ABC News “20 / 20” report found, even erroneous--all the more reason to hire civics teachers whose academic expertise and enthusiasm for social studies precede the job.

If California’s windy educrats believe their own bluster about higher standards, then they should insist that secondary instructors be college majors in the academic subjects they profess to teach--not merely pinch-hitters playing the state credential game.