Wednesday, May 2, 2001
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Wednesday, May 2, 2001 |
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Let's give 'Teach for Georgia' a fair chance By AMY RILEY Last week marks a new day dawning in the state of Georgia in terms of addressing teacher shortages in public school classrooms. The Teach for Georgia program, an "alternative certification program designed to fill classrooms with working professionals without education degrees," sponsored by the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, was announced last Tuesday. By Wednesday, interested callers had jammed the commission's e-mail server and phone lines. What is Teach for Georgia, and what can we expect to see in the wake of this wave? For starters, Teach for Georgia will train teachers. Participants must have a college degree with a minimum grade point average of 2.5. They must pass the Praxis I teachers' exam to take the course. Then within the two years of their provisional certificate, they must also pass the Praxis II teachers' exam and take whatever subject area courses are required to be certified in a particular subject field. Teach for Georgia is an interim solution to a growing problem. Enrollment in state colleges of education is dropping. Many new teachers are leaving their jobs behind after only a few years on the job. A growing number of veteran teachers are fast approaching retirement eligibility, and all the while the state legislature is mandating lower teacher-to-student ratios, pay bonuses linked to student performance on standardized tests, and the latest volley in education reform, an end to social promotion. What we have is an emerging crisis. The Teach for Georgia program does nothing to address the root causes of the teacher shortage, but rather tries to minimize the impact of the shortage on students. Some Georgia educators are insulted by the suggestion that anyone with a college degree can teach school, and say that this is just another example of the devaluation of the teaching profession which causes teachers to leave their jobs in the first place. Some add that adding mentoring of untrained teachers to their ever-growing job description simply takes away from their teaching proficiency. Those are pretty fair criticisms, but let's not circle the wagons and doom a program to failure without at least a fair hearing. Critics argue that the 20 percent one-year attrition rate of provisionally certified professionals in a similar program in Massachusetts means that the program is unsuccessful, but that means that 80 percent stayed. Others suggest that college graduates with no education school background and no classroom experience do students a disservice in the classroom, but in many classrooms across the state long-term substitutes are employed with only a high school level of education. Which is better? To assess the true value of this program, we have to look at experience and motivation. Making it through an engineering program, or dental school, or passing the Certified Public Accountant's exam, or having working knowledge of technical programs counts for something in terms of having some knowledge that is useful to students. Experience gained through a career in the military, sales, management, communications, journalism, publishing, or production has some usefulness to students, too. The assumption is that if a person was capable of learning the necessary skills for these jobs, they are also capable of learning the necessary skills to teach. And learn they will. To be sure, it won't be easy, but it is possible. Even teachers fresh out of education schools learn by being thrown into the deep end of a classroom, for there is no training that can substitute for years of experience actually doing the job. That much is true for everybody. When assessing the value of career experience, we shouldn't overlook family and parental experience. A parent in their thirties or forties is certainly "trained" in managing children, at least one would hope so anyway. Just as teaching is a great proving ground for future parents, parenting is a great proving ground for future teachers. The biggest indicator of the Teach for Georgia program's potential for success will be the personal motivation of the program participants. For what possible reason would a moderately- to well-paid individual leave the security of a known job for the insecurity of an underpaid teaching job? They will because they want to, because job status means little if you don't believe that the job you are doing is making a difference to somebody. Sadly, though, it won't be the program participants that determine the success or failure of the Teach for Georgia program. It will be the educational establishment itself. If no one is willing to hire these wannabe teachers, then the program will be worthless. If administrators and veteran educators aren't willing to take a chance on a few people who are willing to take that chance themselves, then the true value of this program will never be known. Whether we avail ourselves of this opportunity or not remains to be seen, but I hope that we don't miss the forest while we're analyzing all the trees. [Your comments are welcome at: ARileyFreePress@aol.com.]
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