The One Percent Solution by Gordon Lafer

Author:Gordon Lafer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ILR PRESS AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published: 2017-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

Further, Finnish teachers are expected to continue honing their craft over the course of an extended career. The director general of the country’s Ministry of Education explains that the school system follows a practice of “trust-based educational leadership” that endows teachers with “the full range of professional autonomy to practice what they have been educated to do: to plan, teach, diagnose, execute, and evaluate.”93 Rather than a routine that one learns once and repeats annually, teaching is treated as an endeavor of constant reflection and refinement in which the skills teachers bring to a classroom evolve and improve over time.

At home, however, state policies have been moving in the opposite direction. As long ago as 2001, the ALEC-affiliated Mackinac Center called for “privatizing or even loosening teacher certification.”94 In recent years, five states have adopted legislation doing just that. Many more, however, have either largely or completely exempted charter schools from certification requirements, and have allowed Teach for America staff to take sole responsibility for a class after no more than six weeks’ training. The preamble to ALEC’s Alternative Certification Act complains that “to obtain an education degree, students must often complete requirements in educational methods, theory and style rather than in-depth study in a chosen subject area,” and calls for “alternative teacher certification programs to prepare persons with subject area expertise and life experience to become teachers.” In 2013, Wisconsin adopted ALEC standards for charter school teachers, requiring that the state certify teachers as long as they have a BA and demonstrated proficiency in their subject matter, thus granting licenses to people who may have studied English or biology but have not spent a day mastering the pedagogy of how to teach these subjects.95

This stripping out of pedagogical training runs counter to common experience. When adults are asked to name their best English or math teacher, what makes their choices stand out is not that the person knew how to count or spell better than others, but how they taught the material. Yet this nearly universal recognition is ignored by corporate advocates. In Texas, the Chamber of Commerce in 2015 called for “alternative certification programs that provide school districts flexibility in hiring people holding bachelors’ degrees or higher who pass certification exams.”96 For charter schools, ALEC goes further; its 2014 model Public Charter Schools Act states simply that “teachers in public charter schools shall be exempt from state teacher certification requirements.”97 And given the choice, charter schools increasingly choose to avoid certification. At one celebrated charter chain, executives openly disdain the value of teacher education programs, preferring to rely on a system of pay incentives to reward teachers for achieving math and reading test score goals.98

So too, the combination of pay cuts, deunionization, crowded classrooms, and teaching to the test has created a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, leading to a less experienced, higher-turnover teaching staff. Teachers complain not only of financial stress and crowded classrooms but of the increasing difficulty of doing the work they entered the profession to carry out.

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