Teacher certification
Friday, October 7th, 2005
By Chris Fitzsimon
Should NC accept out of state teacher certification? What’s your solution to our state’s teacher shortages?
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October 8th, 2005 at 5:26 pm
Absolutely! State certification (NC’s, or that of any other state) is no guarantee of teacher quality. North Carolina schools have a hard enough time finding good teachers, it’s ridiculous to deny a potentially rich source of good teachers to them. The situation will be even more grave next year when No Child Left Behind provisions kick in that could cost up to ten thousand NC teachers their jobs (those who do not meet the “Highly Qualified” definition set by the act). Add that to the eleven thousand teaching positions we normally have to fill each year (for which we typically have only about 10,000 qualified applicants) and we wil have a crisis on our hands.
Governor Easley’s arguement that allowing Highly Qualified out of state teachers to teach here would lower our standards looks good on paper, but the reality is we already have nearly one thousand teachers who do not even have college degrees, so our standards are already a joke. He seems more interested in preserving the lucrative business for the company that administers the teachers’ PRAXIS test (the main difference between our standards and those of other states) than in getting good teachers. Open the doors to experienced, highly qualified teachers from other states and trust administrators to make the right decisions as to who to hire.