Posted on 02/28/2004 4:51:37 AM PST by summer
February 22, 2004
Highly Qualified teachers need not apply --The Bush Administration is trying to weaken teacher credentialing.
Anyone familiar with Three-Card Monte knows it’s a game you can’t win. Keeping your eye on the money card is impossible, making the game a perfect street-corner hustle.
It’s also a perfect analogy for the Bush administration’s policy on teacher quality.
In a classic case of “watch what we say, not what we do,” the administration is setting high standards for public school teachers. Then, while our attention is diverted, it is covertly working to weaken the “alternate route” entry path for teachers, in order to soften the landscape for vouchers.
Under the administration’s so-called “No Child Left Behind” act, all public school teachers of core academic subjects (English, math, science, foreign languages, history, geography, civics and government, economics, and arts) must be “highly qualified” by September 2005.
“Highly qualified” means holding at least a bachelor’s degree, and obtaining full state certification or passing a state teacher licensing exam. The bar is unusually high for beginning special education teachers and middle school/high school teachers who teach multiple subjects. They must either pass a rigorous state test in each subject they teach or successfully complete coursework or credentialing in each subject area. Veterans must either do the same or demonstrate their competence in all subjects they teach in a state evaluation.
Ironically, under the newly enacted District of Columbia voucher law – a major priority of the Bush administration and its allies in Congress – teachers in private and religious schools receiving taxpayer-funded vouchers don’t even need to possess a college degree.
Whatever happened to “highly qualified” teachers?
This is a common theme with “No Child Left Behind.” The rhetoric sounds great, but there’s a rather profound lack of sincerity behind it. (There’s also a rather profound lack of funding to implement the law – $9 billion less than authorized this year alone. Small wonder more and more state legislatures are telling the administration to keep its inadequate money, rather than try to comply using already-strapped state revenues.)
But why the double standard on teacher quality? It’s really obvious, once you connect the dots. The Bush administration openly supports vouchers. It tried to get enabling language for a national voucher program into “No Child Left Behind,” but it was deleted in committee.
Undeterred, the administration is doing everything possible to pave the way for an eventual national voucher program. While demanding that public school teachers exhibit the highest quality credentials, it has now pumped $42 million into the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, one of several pro-voucher organizations receiving millions of our tax dollars to further the Bush agenda for privatizing public education.
ABCTE is developing a fast-tracked route for alternative teacher certification (no “highly qualified” caveats here), consisting of – you guessed it – a standardized test. Those lower qualifications will cost a lot less – meaning more profits for private voucher schools.
Last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige lashed out at critics of the administration’s education agenda, saying they had “a different ideology.”
We certainly do. Giving students vouchers to attend private schools – where the qualifications for teachers will apparently be little more than their ability to fog up a mirror – is about as far away from the promise of a “highly qualified” teaching profession as you can get.
Keep your eye on the money card, if you can.
DUH - hello, anybody home !!
In the first place, public schools ought to be regulated, and they ought to provide a quality education to those who go there.
Once a parent decides to send a kid to a private school, it's their choice and they are responsible for the efficacy of that choice.
Hopefully, they choose wisely.
But, in a FREE country, we all should have the right to make bad decisions, and then be prepared to live with the consequences.
This is fine for private schools that don't get tax dollars, but why shouldn't teachers teaching in those schools that accept vouchers be held to the same standards as public school teachers?
These "highly qualified" standards aren't all that difficult to meet. Basically, (in VA at least), a teacher is highly qualified when she's certified to teach her subject. That's little more than a measure of basic subject knowledge competence. Seems to me quite reasonable to require these teachers to meet the same minimal competency standard if they're getting my tax dollars.
Considering the strength and viewpoint of teachers' unions and the deterioration in quality of teachers and education--weakening their credentials might not be a bad idea. During the past few decades, the emphasis on credentials has been accompanied by a dismal drop in quality. Education was much better and students much better off when the local schoolmarm was less credentialed and more responsible.
Seems to me that legions of public school teachers have been getting your tax dollars for years and years without meeting those minimal competency standards. Why not allow private schools to get tax dollars for an equal number of years before they are required to have teachers reach those standards? (I am only half-kidding)
But, from the perspective of the NJ Teachers' Union, it appears their interpretation of the Bush plan, does in fact, help preserve the "privacy" of private schools.
That's what this union objects to - they want private schools regulated just as they are.
Besides, I think every state has minimum standards that private schools and homeschoolers are required to meet.
My kids go to a private school, and they have to comply with state imposed regs for class size, days of school, etc., etc.
ARE we really satisfied to have public education dominated by members of unions that routinely engage in deceptive public relations activities -- in other words, that tell lies and try to make as many people as possible believe them?
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