Should it Be This Easy to Become a Teacher?

I wanted to teach right after college, but I didn’t want to go to education school — too many hours, too much money to commit to a career I wasn’t sure I wanted long-term. So I applied to my high school alma mater, a private day school in New Jersey. During the day of interviews my standard line, so earnest, so arrogant, was, "I want to give something back." It took the head of the upper school to call my bluff: "If you only stay a year or two," he asked, "do you really think you’ll be giving more to the school than you’ll be getting in return?"

It’s a tough question, and it’s one that school districts across the country need to ask of themselves as they continue to fill classrooms with scores of energetic but unprepared teachers like the one I was. Widespread teacher shortages — which will become even more acute in the next few years — have made a mockery of the idea that teachers should have licenses before taking over classrooms. In California, more than 37,000 teachers don’t have credentials. Hundreds of districts, from Boston to Chicago to Seattle, have begun experimenting with alternatives to certification in order to find new teachers. Which may not be a bad thing if you think teacher education programs waste everyone’s time on useless blather like "metacognition" and "modality processing." But as districts race to lower their entrance barriers, it isn’t clear whether staffing classrooms with amateurs is simply a short-term fix (that could have lasting harmful consequences) or a cost-effective long-term solution to our nation’s teacher shortage.

Not so fast, says the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. The Commission points out that in the study, the Teach For America teachers were compared to all new teachers, not just those with credentials. And in Houston, thanks to the emergency hiring of scores of novices, last year 35% of new hires did not even hold a bachelor’s degree. Says the Commission: "To say that TFA teachers do just about as well as other new [Houston] teachers, an extraordinary number of whom are extraordinarily unqualified, is a weak endorsement at best."

Beneath the tired, fruitless battles between Fordham and the Commission are some important truths. We do need to find new ways to attract more and better teachers — and since states seem in no mood to raise taxes, bumping up salaries may not be an option. Lowering entrance barriers is one proven way to attract new talent: there is no doubt that the time and money involved in becoming certified, along with the poor quality of many teacher education programs, turns people away. But it is also true that such barriers tend to weed out the half- hearted: studies show that teachers who go through rigorous preparation programs are nearly three times more likely to stay in the profession long-term than those who don’t. What good will it do if we attract scores of new teachers only to have them leave one or two years later? That’s why many in the educational establishment criticize Teach For America: its graduates are required to stay in their schools for two years, but after that, the vast majority leave. In the years that follow, however, something unexpected has happened: more and more of these graduates at some point in their lives are returning to education, often as administrators.

My alma mater did give me the job, and I stayed for three years. Maybe that wasn’t enough time to give something back. But those years did turn me on to the profession (hey, at least I now write about education), and in the future I do hope to return to the classroom. I’m not sure, however, if that makes it worth it to hire amateurs like me.