Like a lot of academics, Frederick Hess chose to roll out his political grenade in a formal report. It had neat columns, weighty footnotes and a predictably dry tone. But his message was quite clear: There are far too many barriers to being certified as a teacher.
In fact, he argued, a prospective teacher should be certified if he or she possesses a college degree, clears a criminal background check and passes a test measuring “essential teaching skills and mastery of subject matter.”
Hess, a professor of education at the University of Virginia, has received a fair amount of attention, including being invited to the White House recently to speak at an education conference led by First Lady Laura Bush.
His report on teacher certification, however, was published by the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic group often at odds with traditional party creed. Not surprisingly, leaders of teachers unions and some in the education establishment–a historically formidable Democratic constituency–are sharply critical of Hess’ position, even given the serious national teacher shortage.
The conflict highlights the tension within the Democratic Party in a midterm election year when control of Congress will hinge on a party’s ability to define issues with broad voter appeal. Former President Bill Clinton helped refashion his party with a more centrist agenda, advocating issues like welfare reform. Now some Democrats believe President Bush has adopted a mirror image of that approach by seizing on issues like education.
Always a potent issue
Though the federal government, when compared to states, plays a relatively small role in education policy, education is always a potent issue. With a broad acknowledgment of the shortcomings of many public schools, Republicans and Democrats have offered proposals for change with voucher and charter school plans, among others.
Several education experts said they believe Hess’ proposal, because it so frontally challenges the thinking of teachers unions, is likely to set off a political debate, especially within the Democratic Party.
“For various reasons, there are many actors in this debate who want to perpetuate the idea that certification equals quality,” said Andrew Rotherham, director of education policy at the Progressive Policy Institute. “I think that will be a flash point in the following years.
“Teachers are perhaps the most important school variable in student achievement. That will require putting ideology on the shelf in the interest of good public policy. Bush has already shown that he can capture the education issue by embracing centrist ideas, and this will be no exception,” he said.
The Progressive Policy Institute is the policy arm of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that counts Clinton and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a possible presidential candidate in 2004, among its former chairmen.
“The current system creates this dramatic shortage of teachers in underserved communities in the areas that are most critical–math, science and special education,” said Hess. “There is nothing in this argument that is anti-union.”
Variations of Hess’ idea already have taken hold. Forty-five states, including Illinois, permit some kind of alternative certification, according to the National Center for Education Information. About 75,000 teachers have been certified through alternative programs in the last three years, a relatively small number considering that experts believe there will be a shortage of about 2 million teachers in the next decade.
`Teaching is an art and science’
“We also have a national nursing shortage and you don’t see people say, `Let’s send you to a two-week boot camp because you like health care, then put you in a hospital and let you treat people,'” said Melinda Anderson, who analyzes certification programs for the National Education Association, a prominent teachers union.
“The problem is that teaching is an art and science,” Anderson said. “Yes, there are individuals with excellent content knowledge. But teachers also need to know how to teach people. Einstein might have been brilliant in physics, but could he keep 20 hormonally challenged 13-year-olds in their seats?”
Hess said many states’ certification requirements create almost impossible barriers for would-be teachers. He contends that the current certification process gives little assurance that teachers who complete it enter the classroom with the requisite skills to be effective.
“Rejecting knowledge-based and skill-based criteria, certification emphasizes various hard-to-judge personal qualities,” Hess wrote. The current process is more “akin to that of cosmetology than of law or medicine. In a field like the former, certification does not screen out the unskilled or provide an assurance of specialized mastery so much as it provides assurance that the aspirant has completed a prescribed course of study and logged mandatory practice hours.”
Both sides agree that the issue is most pressing in urban and rural school districts that face a chronic teacher shortage. But that is about the only common ground. Hess argues that these troubled school districts need to open the door more easily to people who want to teach, while the NEA’s Anderson says that children in these areas are precisely those who need instructors who have undergone traditional certification.
Proposal called impractical
Emily Feistritzer, president of the National Center for Education Information, said Hess’ idea, while potentially popular, is not practical. “Politically and practically, it’s never going to happen,” she said. “Traditional teacher education certainly has not ensured that we have quality teachers,” she said, but added that the solution is not to “do away with certification.”
Master teacher programs in some states have had strong appeal because of high-profile examples of a teacher who has gone from a professional job like a lawyer or engineer into the classroom and to raves from parents and students. But such examples, said Arthur Wise, president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, are few.
“What you end up with instead are recent college graduates who can’t get a job anywhere else and people who are working in various entry-level jobs and aren’t making it” applying to be teachers, Wise said.
