Differentiated Staffing - qualifications-based titles as means to improve teacher recruitment and retention

School Administrator, Jan, 2001 by Arthur E. Wise

Would alternative titles, based on the candidate's route to the classroom, maintain teacher quality?

Every fall, parents worry about the teachers to whom their children will be as signed. Can the teacher teach? Will their child learn? These are legitimate questions, given a growing shortage of licensed teachers.

Qualified teachers are in demand nationwide. As states raise their entrance standards for greater accountability, fewer candidates may meet them, exacerbating the problem of teacher supply.

Of course, emergency licensing provisions in most states allow school districts to circumvent licensing requirements so they can place a warm body in every classroom. At the same time, states do not issue emergency licenses to engineers to build bridges, to architects to design buildings or to doctors to practice medicine if those individuals have not prepared fully for their professional roles. The public would identify this as fraud.

In major cities and rural areas, when districts cannot find enough qualified teachers at the salary they are able or willing to pay, unprepared individuals are hired and ate called teachers. Administrators may not want to do this but see no way out.

New York City recently opened the classroom doors in the city's lowest-performing schools to anyone with a college degree who took a couple of weeks of training in August. The system calls them "teaching fellows." When broadcast journalist John Merrow observed and interviewed these teaching fellows on their first day of school for a segment on PBS' "Newshour," he found their classrooms were out of control. It was clear the new "teachers" did not understand students, classroom management or what to do next if their first strategy failed. Why do we grant the venerable title "teacher" to these individuals with no expertise? This practice makes me wonder what value New York places on teaching its neediest children. Is there a viable alternative? Can we develop differentiated staffing policies that distinguish between those who are qualified and those who decide to try teaching the day before school begins?

Public Disclosure

Our current education system obscures from view the qualifications of teachers. Parents do not know whether their child's teacher is prepared and fully qualified to teach. No diplomas or state licenses are displayed on classroom walls.

If schools were required to disclose teachers' qualifications to parents, public awareness would be raised on this issue--the educational equivalent of a truth-in-labeling law. Those who meet the increasingly rigorous state licensing requirements could be given the title of teacher. Those whom school districts must hire to fill vacant classrooms or teach courses for which they are not qualified could be known by a lesser title--perhaps para-teacher, instructor, maybe even babysitter!

When patients visit a dentist, a doctor or a psychologist, they see evidence of competence in the form of certificates on the wall, testifying to their graduation from a professionally accredited program of study, their completion of a supervised internship and their receipt of a state license indicating readiness to practice.

This is not the case in teaching. The certificates are absent. Why? Teaching has long been thought of as a job anybody can do. If anybody can teach, why require a license or certificate?

The organization I direct, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, is the nonprofit, nongovernmental professional accrediting body for teacher preparation. Accreditation is voluntary, and not all colleges of education are accredited. Does accreditation make a difference in the quality of teachers? We know that new teacher graduates who have prepared at NCATE-accredited institutions significantly outperform those from unaccredited institutions on PRAXIS II, the most common state licensing examination, and both groups outperform those test takers who never completed a teacher preparation program.

Disparate Routes

School districts today can hire teachers from all three camps: those who have prepared at accredited colleges of education, those who have studied at unaccredited colleges of education and a growing number of "walk-ins" carrying emergency credentials.

The new teachers who've prepared at an accredited college have a major or the equivalent of a major in the subject area to be taught; know how to teach the subject effectively to students; have been assessed throughout their studies, not just during student teaching and can reflect upon what is taught and change what does not work by applying a body of knowledge about teaching and learning to the situation.

But right now no distinctions are made among graduates who enter from the disparate routes. They all carry the same title and salary. Those who committed time and resources to become a teacher may teach alongside someone who wandered through the door during the first week of school.

Mary Lease, a high school English teacher from Cape Coral, Fla., who holds hard-earned certification from the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, believes that state education agencies could improve the stature of teaching by acknowledging the training path taken by each teacher and developing different titles and roles.