Posted on 07/12/2022 11:23:29 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed a bill earlier this week stipulating that students can begin teaching public school classrooms without having completed a college degree.
This is a bad law, borne of staffing desperation and Arizona’s history of underpaying and under-preparing its teachers.
Arizona ranks 44 out of 50 states for average teacher pay, with salaries much lower than those of other college graduates, according to a report from the National Education Association, last updated in April 2022.
Arizona School Personnel Administration released a survey in February showing that teachers who did not meet state certification requirements filled more than 47 percent of teaching vacancies, Arizona Republic reported.
Senate Bill 1159 does specify some restrictions which many press reports have omitted. Teachers admitted under this program must be enrolled in college and engaged in some kind of training program. However, the Arizona Board of Education “may not require a prescribed program sequence, content or design from the school district or charter school in order to obtain approval,” according to SB 1159.
New teachers hired under this program also will not be allowed to “regularly instruct students without the presence of a full-time teacher, certificated teacher, instructional coach or instructional mentor unless the candidate possesses other means of certification,” according to the bill.
Nonetheless, the bill will allow undergraduate students to lead K-12 classroom instruction. This is not good. Conservatives have criticized education majors as lightweight: heavy on ideology and low on content. However, a college major surely teaches some organization and responsibility that would make a graduate a preferable teacher to a non-graduate, all other things being equal. Graduates are also much more likely to be older, more experienced and more mature.
Also, just because many education degrees are subpar doesn’t mean they must be that way. Colleges could design majors and programs that train students in content knowledge and sound pedagogy. Hillsdale College seems to offer such a program. Lawmakers should propose better preparation, not less preparation.
Though good teaching training programs exist, they require a substantial commitment, much more than any on-the-job training program a school could provide to a working classroom teacher.
Even more, it seems impossibly demanding to ask a full-time undergraduate student to teach a classroom on top of their course load. A 2022 report by the EdWeek Research Center and commissioned by Merrimack College surveyed more than 1,300 U.S. teachers and found that they reported working an average of 54 hours per week, just 25 hours of which were spent teaching students.
The certified teacher or “instructional mentor” specified by the bill to supervise the new teacher may relieve some of that burden, but it’s not clear by how much. Nothing in the law guarantees that a hapless undergrad teacher wouldn’t need to do all that classroom work on her own.
It’s hard to imagine that she could simultaneously take a full college course load and succeed in both.
The EdWeek study also reveals that teachers are unhappy with many aspects of their profession. Just 12 percent said they were very satisfied with their jobs, and less than half said the general public respects them and views them as professionals. Most teachers also said they “lack control of their time,” according to the report summary. A new undergraduate Arizona teacher would contend with these pressures and poor conditions on top of her inexperience and time deficit.
“For the past eight years, we have made it a priority to give our kids a high-quality education, and this legislation builds on those actions,” Governor Ducey stated in a July 5 news release. “S.B. 1159 will ensure that more Arizonans have the opportunity to pursue a career in education and help get our kids caught up.”
Giving Arizonans more opportunities is a useful cover for the grim reality that Arizona is desperate for teachers.
In February, data released by the Arizona Department of Education showed that the number of full-time teachers was the lowest since at least 2004, according to ABC.
As of January 2022, nearly 2,000 teacher positions were unfilled, and nearly 1000 had resigned by February, according to an article published February 2022 by Cronkite News, a division of Arizona PBS.
“Arizona has some of the largest class sizes in the nation and some of the lowest funding,” the news outlet reported.
No wonder Arizona needs to turn to undergraduates to staff its classrooms.
I taught school in Arizona from 2015-18, and it was the hardest professional experience of my life. I routinely went home to piles of grading and emotionally exhausting parent emails after eight or more hours at school. My health deteriorated, and my paychecks were so low that, as a single person, I relied on family members to help make ends meet for housing and food. Many of my peers were similarly overwhelmed.
Undergoing all of that as a 19-year-old college student seems incomprehensible.
Arizona children already held back by COVID shutdowns need mature, well-trained teachers, not burned-out neophytes. SB 1159 is not fair to the college kids, and it’s not fair to the students they teach.
There’s nothing conservative about abdicating the responsibility to effectively transmit skills and knowledge to the next generation.
Parents, demand solid, content-rich, evidence-based training for your teachers, whether they work in public, charter, private or religious schools. Advocate for the salaries and the respect they deserve. Don’t accept compromises disguised as expanded opportunity.
Your children deserve nothing less.
Kids deserve better than Woketards with education degrees from Bill Ayers blessed colleges....
Other actual teachers not corrupted by Cultural Marxism should still be employable, though.
Teaching is an inherent ability. Not everybody has it and it cannot really be learned.
If they can show competence in their material and can teach it, I don’t care about the degree.
You don’t need a degree in teaching to teach kids about the gay life style, choosing your own gender, diversity, inclusion or why America sucks.
Teachers need a degree in the subject matter they teach, not an education degree.
Oh no, how unfair is that? Now all those gender/race/hate/grievance Studies majors may be undercut by all the students who are failing high school. How soon before the gov begins importing foreign teachers, which would probably be a bad idea...not because it hurts wages, but because so many foreign countries have actual academic standards for their students,
I think its wonderful
Education degrees are negative value added. A smart 19 year-old is likely to do a better job than your typical “highly trained education professionals”, who are overpaid for what they do and produce and GENERALLY deserve NO respect. Hell, there are data showing that the children of homeschooling parents without college degrees score far higher on average than government school students who have had the “benefit” of all those teachers with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education.
There's no reason that someone with only a high school diploma (assuming it's merited and not a participation trophy) cannot teach grade school kids.
Considering what college “education” departments are churning out these days, I have no problem with this. What drives the education cartel nuts is that homeschool parents, often lacking the “proper” degrees, are putting the public schools to shame.
I did Awana at my church for 15 years. Almost without exception, the homeschooled kids were ahead of their public school peers when it came to memorization, basic knowledge and work ethic. I frequently was amazed by what homeschoolers knew and what the public school kids DIDN’T know.
Bull. College produces woke idiots with education degrees. Don’t need a degree to know how to teach kids math, art, English, writing; just ask the thousands of homeschool teachers out there.
As far as full time students also teaching kids? Again, bull. A person could teach full time and go to school part time. Or part time and part time. Sure, it will take longer to get that degree, but who cares.
Get over it. College sucks rocks.
Least they won’t have any bad habits.
Honestly this is probably worth looking into. Obviously there should be other benchmarks but just having a piece of paper you practically just buy these days is not a good indicator of someone’s skill. When I was going though college I distinctly remember some of our best engineering teachers were the least “educated” but most experienced. Some of our worst came from the PhD education pipeline. In my junior/senior years these BS and MS engineers were being replaced due to their education level. At some point emphasis on a piece of paper needs to be replaced with an actual quantifier or qualifier for a job.
I don’t have a certified degree. And I could OUT TEST 98% of all Universty graduates in many subjects. My brother in law in California never was CERTIFIED to teach English, but he DID under false pretenses teach, and all of his students scored in the upper 90 percentile. I think they need to pay teachers according to how their students end up at the end of the year in testing. As they say in the Army.THE SOLDIER DIDN’T LEARN BECAUSE THE SARGEANT DIDN’T TEACH HIM. If evaluation testing shows kids get high marks, I have NO problem that the teachers didn’t go to the halls of persion and learn that there are unlimited numbers of genders.
“How soon before the gov begins importing foreign teachers, which would probably be a bad idea...not because it hurts wages, but because so many foreign countries have actual academic standards for their students,”
I believe there are several states that already do that. I saw a documentary about a school district in New Mexico that recruits teachers (college graduates) to teach at their schools.
Probably by the end of this decade, a couple of events will have happened in so called Public Schools.
1. Students will not have to demonstrate any math skills nor English skills including reading and writing to get a diploma.
2. With #1 above there will be zero need for teachers with a college degree. So called learning rooms will be monitored by closed circuit TV and student monitors.
With #1 and #2 above, there will be no need for teachers, their unions and teacher retirement plans.
Get grandma and grandpa teaching!
You didn't just buy it either. The taxpayers through their Communist government bought and paid for it.
Teaching is an inherent ability. Not everybody has it and it cannot really be learned.
It is revealing to consider that nearly everyone can remember a teacher or two or even three who made a positive contribution to his or her life. But usually not too many more than that out of the dozens of teachers we have.
Public schools are NOT all alike. There are many excellent ones.
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