You might have thought that alternative certification of teachers was more vibrant, robust and widespread than ever, considering how many states now claim to have some form of it--45 of them plus D.C., reports alt-cert watcher Emily Feistritzer--and its warm embrace last June by Education Secretary Rod Paige.
Think again. In truth, something bad is happening to alternative certification: it's being turned into a teacher-preparation "program"--and regulated into a near facsimile of traditional programs.
In its original, uncorrupted form, alternative certification is a status conferred on individuals who satisfy their states that they are fit to be turned loose in public-school classrooms despite NOT having passed through teacher-preparation programs. It was to be public education's way of liberating itself to do what private schools and most charter schools have long been free to do, namely to hire the best people they can find, with or without formal teacher training. It was also a way of saying to able liberal-arts graduates and career changers who are willing to try teaching that yes, you are welcome in our classrooms without first having to go back to study in a college of education and jump through a lot of regulatory hoops.
The key point is that alternative certification is conferred on individuals based on evidence that they know their stuff and pose no danger to children. It's what would enable a former governor to teach civics in a public high school, a bright MIT chemistry major to teach science, or a retired newspaper editor to teach English composition. It was NOT to be a training program.
How might a state certify someone who didn't pass through an approved program? Easy. By doing a background check, giving the candidate a subject matter test and perhaps an oral exam, checking his college transcript, seeking references from those who know him well, maybe asking him to teach a practice lesson in front of a jury. Perhaps such screenings would lead only to a provisional form of certification that could be made more definitive on the basis of a month or year of successful classroom practice, attested to by the new teacher's principal or supervisor or by assessment evidence that the new teacher's pupils were gaining satisfactory knowledge and skills.
That's how its pure version works. But powerful forces are now striving to turn alternative certification into a training program and then regulate it into close conformity with conventional teacher preparation. That's because the teacher-training-and-licensure crowd--which detests pure alt-cert and finds its own power, status and revenues menaced by its spread--has concluded that alternative certification cannot be blocked altogether and therefore must be tamed and put into a box.
This strategy is familiar to anyone who has watched the charter-school movement these past few years, as its enemies realized they could not stonewall charter schools entirely and therefore shifted tactics to keep them few, weak, ill-funded, ill-housed, and subject to ever more of the regulatory burdens that beset conventional public schools. At day's end, if that strategy succeeds, charters won't be any different from the regular schools to which they were meant to be alternatives--and nobody will bother with them, especially considering how hard it is to get them up and running.
Thus with alternative certification. The teacher unions, ed schools and custodians of canonical "teacher professionalism" such as the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) have resolved to minimize its threat by transforming it from "route" into "program" and then regulating the heck out of it.
Watch how often the word "program" is now affixed to the phrases "alternative certification" and "alternate route." Education Week's latest Quality Counts does this not only with labels but also by devoting half of its big chart (on "State Alternative-Route Programs") to the ways in which states currently regulate such "programs" by requiring "pre-service training" and "mentoring components." The authors of Quality Counts solemnly declare that "Experts agree that such elements are crucial to producing a well-trained teacher workforce"--thus swallowing the view that "training" is what alternative certification is about.
To be sure, there are some terrific "programs" out there--Teach for America is probably the best known--that provide compressed and intense training for people who then become candidates for alternative certification. May such programs grow and flourish. But we ought to continue to view them as programs by which people become more promising candidates to obtain alt-cert from the state. They are NOT "alt-cert programs" that the state (much less the feds) should regulate.
Yet Uncle Sam, too, seems to have succumbed to the programmatic version of alternative certification. In final regulations detailing how the "highly-qualified teacher" provisions of NCLB will be interpreted, the Education Department declared that teachers may be considered "highly qualified" if they are participating in "an alternative route to certification under which the teacher (1) receives high-quality professional development that is sustained, intensive, and classroom-focused,...(2) participates in a program of intensive supervision that consists of structured guidance and regular ongoing support for teachers or a teacher mentoring program; (3) assumes functions as a teacher only for a specified period of time not to exceed three years, and (4) demonstrates satisfactory progress toward full certification...."
This means that Washington's weight will now press states to view alternative certification not as an individual's status, but as educator-designed and heavily-regulated training programs with most of the earmarks of conventional teacher preparation programs. Moreover, such programs will confer only a temporary credential on teachers who must then become "fully certified."
This is far from where Secretary Paige was six months earlier when he wrote of "alternate routes" (in his "Annual Report on Teacher Quality") that "Academic standards must remain high, while burdensome requirements must be kept to a minimum. An alternate route that takes two years and thousands of dollars to complete is an alternate route in name only." Indeed, Paige urged "streamlining" traditional certification programs "to focus on the few things that really matter: verbal ability, content knowledge, and, as a safety precaution, a background check."
The kind of alt-cert program that the Education Department now evidently seeks, however, will cost many thousands of dollars, an expense to be borne largely at the district level where the mentoring/ induction/ supervision must be provided. Part of the value of "pure" alt-cert was that teachers would be judged by results and competencies rather than inputs. Now we must look for costly inputs, which in a time of tight budgets could further chill the whole enterprise.
What happened between June and December? Evidently alt-cert's foes came down hard on the executive branch and basically got their way. This would matter less if the states were still in charge of teacher certification. Innovative jurisdictions could then continue to experiment with pure forms of alternative certification. But with Uncle Sam now policing their compliance with NCLB's dictates, we have reason to worry that the alt-cert "route" is fast acquiring the same contortions and hurdles as the regular kind. It's like turning an interstate highway back into a twisty gravel road.
"Alternative Teacher Certification--An Overview," by Emily Feistritzer, The National Center for Education Information, 2002.
Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge: The Secretary's Annual Report on Teacher Quality, US Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education, 2002. See especially "alternate routes to certification: a model for the future" in chapter 2 and "alternate routes to the solution" in chapter 4.
