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My Opinion Jim Kiser: Teacher Guidelines Silent on Learning

Posted on: Thursday, 23 February 2006, 09:00 CST

By Jim Kiser, ARIZONA DAILY STAR

A news story Sunday reported Arizona is struggling to meet the federal government's requirement of having a "highly qualified" teacher in every classroom.

What first caught my attention, the state's problems aside, is that the federal government's definition of "highly qualified" is woefully inadequate.

To be "highly qualified" under the federal guidelines, a teacher must have a bachelor's degree, full state certification and either an advanced degree, 24 course credits or a passing grade on a state test.

However, the federal government's definition says nothing about whether kids learn in the teacher's classroom. It says nothing about whether the teacher knows how to teach. And it says nothing about whether the teacher even likes kids.

I don't doubt that the federal government's guidelines would result in some people being designated as "highly qualified" teachers when they absolutely should not be in the classroom.

In the 1960s, two education reformers, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, proposed that any person wanting to be a teacher must prove he or she has had at least one loving relationship with another person. They explicitly said spouses may be counted.

Caring for other people certainly is not sufficient to make a person a good teacher. But Postman and Weingartner's 40-year-old rule is more relevant today than the fed's emphasis on counting the number of credits a teaching candidate has accumulated.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne offers sentiments that sound similar. "In the short term, it's a little extreme," Sunday's story quoted him as saying of the federal policy. "It proceeds on the assumptions that the only thing that matters is subject knowledge."

Then, there's the significant issue of whether the federal government should even be attempting to make judgments about the quality of individual teachers. Whatever happened to the idea of local schools, locally controlled?

Incentive to teach

It is impossible, of course, for Arizona's school districts to ignore the problem of attracting qualified teachers into the classroom.

A story in Tuesday's Arizona Republic noted that some school districts near the Phoenix metropolitan area are turning to a variety of incentives to lure teachers.

The Coolidge Unified School District, for instance, is working with the Chamber of Commerce and local builders to see if it can't devise a housing incentive program. And nearby Florence is seriously considering a four-day school week, with Superintendent Richard Sagar telling the newspaper that surveys show it would give the district "a huge competitive edge" in attracting teachers.

Other districts within Phoenix are trying more usual incentives. The Phoenix Union High School District offers a $5,000 bonus for teachers in certain subject areas. And the Glendale Elementary School District is offering a $500 bonus to employees who recruit a teacher.

Such incentives are an obvious step in the right direction. Now, the districts should go further and adopt such practices as paying higher salaries (not just bonuses) to teachers in hard-to-recruit specialties, such as math and science, and paying teachers based on their performance at helping students learn. That is an obvious idea, but it isn't used often enough.

I would go further and eliminate teacher certification requirements, which keep some highly capable people out of the classroom because they lack the proper credentials.

For one thing, paper credentials don't ensure that a teacher will be any good. And for another, it has always seemed to me that superintendents and principals should be responsible for hiring good teachers.

However, neither government nor the educational establishment has been willing to embrace this idea even though many other fields don't require certification. There are no certification requirements for newspaper columnists, for instance. But then I imagine some educators reading this column will say that is precisely the problem.

Editorial columnist Jim Kiser appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Contact him at jkiser@azstarnet.com or 807-8012.

Source: Arizona Daily Star

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