Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Alternative Paths to Teacher Certification, page 5

No Consensus
What is clear is that all students need good teachers—knowledgeable, committed, skilled, creative and caring people—but no one yet seems to have produced a definitive method for identifying who those teachers are—or who has the potential to become an effective teacher. For example, according to the Humphrey–Wechsler study, although “In many states, alternative certification now plays a central role in the production of new teachers. . .[On] a basic level there is no agreement about what constitutes alternative certification.” For that matter, says Dan Goldhaber, a labor economist and research associate professor at the University of Washington’s Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, there is no consensus on the licensing examinations used to determine teacher quality. “They’re all over the map,” he explains.

In the course of his work at the university’s Center on Reinventing Public Education, Goldhaber has studied the teacher labor market and the impact of teacher quality on student achievement—perhaps the most fundamental educational issue of them all. In a new study funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Goldhaber will examine the relationship between teacher performance on certification or licensure exams such as Praxis I and II and student learning gains as measured over time by the standardized accountability tests used in North Carolina. While examining the nature of that relationship—is it “causal or merely correlational?”—the study will attempt to determine the consequences of the widely varying cutoff scores used by school districts, which result in the inclusion or exclusion of potential teachers. According to Goldhaber, not much evidence exists to demonstrate whether licensure exams are effective in “screening out potentially low-quality teachers.” There is considerable evidence, however, that the use of these tests affects minorities disproportionately since minority teacher candidates generally experience a lower pass rate than white candidates. Is it possible that high-quality minority teachers might be eliminated from the pool of potential teachers by tests that may or may not accurately predict teacher performance and the impact of this performance on student learning gains? Goldhaber’s study is intended “to help states make more informed decisions about the use of licensure exams.” Meanwhile, lawsuits filed against school districts in Texas, California and Alabama are challenging testing practices in teacher licensing— practices that, plaintiffs charge, are discriminatory.

American Education
at a Crossroads—Again
When the framers of the U.S. Constitution delegated responsibility for education to the states, it is unlikely that even this group of visionaries could have imagined the whirlwind of contentiousness that would ensue. “The U.S. Constitution has not provided Americans with a national voice for education,” Vartan Gregorian observes, “but a chorus of voices, who, rather disconcertingly, rarely sing from the same libretto.” Occasionally, as in the lawsuits cited, the lack of consensus finds its way into the judicial system for resolution.

Since publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, the report to the U.S. Secretary of Education by the National Commission on Excellence in Education that famously warned about the poor quality of American education, the educational and political establishments appear to have achieved consensus on at least one issue. Abundant research now is available to confirm what common sense suggested was true all along: good teaching matters. In fact, in the 20 years or so since A Nation at Risk, the consensus appears to be that it matters most. Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., chairman of The Teaching Commission and former chairman of IBM, writes in the preface to the Commission’s report, Teaching at Risk: A Call to Action: “. . .[Our] nation is at a crossroads. We will not continue to lead if we persist in viewing teaching—the profession that makes all other professions possible—as a second-rate occupation. Nothing is more vital to our future than ensuring that we attract and retain the best teachers in our public schools.”

As America’s audacious experiment in mass public education continues to unfold—replete with inequity and resplendent with achievement—it is remarkable how frequently American education has found itself “at the crossroads.” This time, as we try to come to terms with the formidable challenge of teacher education reform, we discover that the crossroads actually resembles a tangle of overlapping and intersecting paths. What’s confusing, of course, is that there are many signs pointing to what seems to be a single place, a place called: “Quality Alternative Teacher Training (Certification Guaranteed).” Dotting this landscape of tangled paths are hundreds of institutions with their own signs beckoning the weary traveler: “Quality University-Based Teacher Education Programs (Certification Guaranteed).”

Two decades after the publication of A Nation at Risk, America’s university-based teacher education programs have taken their share of hits, and, more recently, so have alternative teacher certification programs. As the respective proponents and opponents of “traditional” versus “nontraditional” approaches to teacher training face off, it’s just possible that what is unfolding is the characteristically chaotic, utterly inefficient American version of the creative process. Do we know enough to create a new model of teacher preparation that will allow us to place the teacher education “debate” in the historical dustbin?

“We know enough,” concludes the report on the Humphrey–Wechsler study, “to move the debate over teacher preparation beyond sweeping generalizations and overstatements to the crafting of policies and programs that put effective teachers in every classroom.”

In a very real sense, where this critical teacher preparation takes place—in university-based teacher education programs or in alternative teacher certification programs—is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is whether traditional and nontraditional teacher education programs are ultimately successful in turning out the highly skilled teachers required by America’s children—including all those many children still left behind.

Anne Grosso de León writes about education.