Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Alternative Paths to Teacher Certification

For some, the increasing proliferation of alternative teacher certification programs is just what the doctor ordered—a dynamic, market-driven phenomenon designed to alleviate the nation’s chronic shortage of K–12 teachers. Others regard alternative certification with skepticism, pointing out that shortcuts to teacher education tend to turn out inadequately prepared teachers, who are then expected to take on the most difficult challenges. Can both be right?

For those weary of headlines decrying the poor quality of American education in the twenty-first century—and in particular, the nation’s failure to recruit, train and retain sufficient numbers of qualified teachers—consider this: In the wry, provocative history, America’s Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (William Morrow & Company, 2003), written by The New York Times editorial page editor, Gail Collins, she reports that noted public activist Elizabeth Buffum Chace’s primary recollection about the curriculum of the Connecticut school she attended in 1816 was that it relied heavily on “memorization and beatings.” Collins explains that by the time Chace was 12 years old, she had, in Chace’s words, “recited Murray’s Grammar a dozen times without a word of explanation or application from the book or the teacher.” Chace went on to observe that, “for that time it was a good school.’” Maybe so, for according to Collins, at that time, “Teachers in the middle and southern states were so frequently drunkards that the alcoholic schoolteacher became a stereotype.” Apparently, even then recruiting sufficient numbers of teachers, drunk or sober, was a challenge for the young republic. Collins points out that “ . . . [I]n 1833, the estimated teacher shortage was more than 30,000.” Moreover, even then men did not view teaching as a smart career move—despite the fact that in 1838 wages for male teachers in Connecticut were nearly three times that of wages for women. Collins cites educator Thomas Gallaudet’s observation that, “[for men] there were so many other avenues open in our country to the accumulation of property and the attaining of distinction.”

Who but the history Muse is more effective at vaporizing nostalgia for the “good old days”?

In America, the demand for qualified teachers has usually been a few steps ahead of their supply—and teacher education has always been a work in progress, generally occupying a marginalized status in the culture of higher education. The first “normal” schools in the mid-nineteenth century were at the high school level and were largely attended by women who were admitted at age 16; men were admitted at age 17. The course of study was typically one year. Teachers’ colleges, an outgrowth of the normal schools, never attained the same high status of their liberal arts institutional siblings, nor have they yet.

Today, although university-based teacher education programs remain the primary source of new teachers in America, they are, according to Daniel Fallon, chair of the Education Division of Carnegie Corporation of New York, “now rapidly losing market share at a dizzying rate.” School districts, desperate for the “silver bullet” that will provide them with teachers as quickly as possible, are increasingly looking outside the university to develop alternate paths to teacher training and certification. Certainly their sense of urgency has grown more intense in no small part because the No Child Left Behind Act mandates that all teachers be “highly qualified” in the subjects they teach by the end of the 2005–2006 school year. States failing to comply with the mandate can face stiff sanctions, including the withdrawal or withholding of Title I funds.

In June 2002, the Annual Report on Teacher Quality by the U.S. Secretary of Education delivered a blistering critique of university-based teacher education and certification. In effect, it called for the dismantling of such programs and a redefinition of teacher preparation, one that emphasized higher standards in the acquisition of content knowledge and verbal skills and far less emphasis on educational coursework requirements. The report characterized such coursework as “burdensome.” At the same time, the report recommended that student teaching and attendance at schools of education be made “optional” and that other “bureaucratic hurdles” be eliminated. Declaring that schools of education and formal teacher training programs have failed “to produce the types of highly qualified teachers that the No Child Left Behind Act demands,” the Secretary’s report called on the states to “streamline” their respective systems of teacher certification. According to the report, “Across the country, there are several promising experiments that recruit highly qualified candidates who are interested in teaching but did not attend schools of education and place them quickly in high-need schools, providing training, support and mentoring.”

A Center Established
In October 2003, the Department of Education awarded a grant of $2.5 million to the National Center for Education Information (NCEI) for the establishment of the National Center for Alternative Certification. The new center was to serve as a clearinghouse of information about alternative routes to teacher certification as well as a source for technical assistance and outreach. Given the dramatic growth of alternative route initiatives among the states in the past two decades, the timing of the establishment of NCAC was, to say the least, auspicious.

In 1983, only eight states reported having any alternative to the traditional university-based teacher education route to certifying teachers. By 2003, 43 states, as well as the District of Columbia, reported having some type of alternative route to teacher education and certification. These alternative route initiatives have resulted in the certification of more than 200,000 new teachers, with thousands more who have participated in university-based alternative teacher preparation programs also being licensed to teach. The numbers, though considerable, are relatively modest given the projected need for new teachers in the next decade: more than two million, with 700,000 needed in urban communities, areas suffering the greatest chronic shortages of qualified teachers.

C. Emily Feistritzer, president of NCEI and president and chief executive officer of the National Center for Alternative Certification, argues that the strength of alternative certification is its market-driven impetus. “Programs are created to meet demand,” she explains, “and the market for teachers on the demand side is greatest in rural and poor areas.” Feistritzer applauds the “tremendous enthusiasm” shown by states and colleges “to meet the demand not just for more teachers but for better teachers.” Designed to attract nontraditional candidates to teaching, alternative certification programs, she says, have “forced everyone to revisit the question of what teachers must be able to know and do.” The bottom line, says Feistritzer, is this: “If the alternative route did not exist would this person have gone into teaching?”

Next page: Maybe so, but others, such as Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, point out that “Alternative certification comes in all shapes and sizes, and is only as good as its preparation.”

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