Linda Darling-Hammond, Education Policy Analysis Archives
September 6, 2002
In this long article, also found in the dubious on-line holdings of the Phoenix-based Education Policy Analysis Archives, Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond responds to the October 2001 report on teacher certification by the Abell Foundation ("Teacher Certification Reconsidered: Stumbling for Quality," by Kate Walsh, Abell Foundation, 2001, http://www.abell.org/TeacherCertReconsidered.pdf) and to Secretary Paige's use of that report in his own recent "Annual Report on Teacher Quality." ("Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge: The Secretary's Annual Report on Teacher Quality," by Rod Paige, US Department of Education, June 2002, http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/News/teacherprep/AnnualReport.pdf) This is not Professor Darling-Hammond's first response, but she will henceforth claim that it's a "peer-reviewed" study. It concludes just what you would expect, that Abell was wrong in a hundred ways and that the Secretary of Education was wrong to rely on Abell. So be it. That debate will continue. But the essay also contains this fascinating admission by Darling-Hammond: "It is true that certification is a relatively crude measure of teachers' knowledge and skills, since the standards for subject matter and teaching knowledge embedded in certification have varied across states and over time, are differently measured, and are differently enforced from place to place." Well said. Nobody ever contended that certification matters not at all. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. The big question is whether going through the things one goes through to get certified should be the only possible pathway into public school teaching, or whether schools should be free to choose between candidates who did those things and those who arrived via other routes. The sensible observer might say let's quit trying to fine-tune this "crude" instrument for controlling entry and shift instead to actual measures, such as testable teacher knowledge and hard evidence of teachers' classroom effectiveness. But of course that's not where Professor Darling-Hammond goes. Instead, she repairs to her usual destination, a call "to improve preparation opportunities and certification standards." Have a look for yourself at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n36/.
