This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 2, 2009 - Six months after Missouri legislators opened an alternative route to full professional teacher certification, a controversial program is set to release potentially hundreds of candidates into the job market. Many school districts say they are open to hiring the prospective teachers, particularly for hard-to-staff math and science positions.
Roughly 1,000 people in Missouri have signed up for the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence program, which allows mid-career professionals a quicker entry into the classroom. About half of the enrollments are in math and science, according to Dave Saba, president of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization.
"We've never had that many candidates from a single state upon startup, and that's counting larger states like Florida and Pennsylvania," Saba said.
The law allows those who complete ABCTE's program to be eligible for a state teaching certificate. School districts decide for themselves whether to accept the program's graduates.
It's too early to tell exactly how many hopeful teachers will be seeking employment come fall, as the vast majority of ABCTE students haven't finished their requirements. Earlier in February, only 11 had obtained their licenses via the alternative program, according to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Some students are looking to get hired at a school for the first time; others hope to keep their teaching jobs by acquiring additional credentials that districts require.
Missouri is the eighth state to approve the program as an alternative route to certification. Students such as Rachele Leach, who owns a company with her husband, say they are glad to have a flexible way to work toward a teaching certificate. Having already earned two advanced degrees, Leach said the path to getting a teaching credential had "never been friendly," particularly with children in school.
Leach was attracted by the mostly online nature of the ABCTE program. Prospective teachers pay $850 to enroll, and requirements include 60 hours in the classroom and 30 hours of professional development. Students also take part in mentoring programs and go through a teaching evaluation. At the end of the program they are tested on both their subject matter and professional teaching knowledge.
Controversy Continues
ABCTE began in 2001 with the help of a U.S. Department of Education grant and on the heels of The No Child Left Behind Act, which requires school districts to have all of their teachers in core academic subjects be "highly qualified." The alternative program can certify people in subjects such as English/language arts, biology and U.S./world history, but not in early childhood education, elementary education or special education.
In Missouri, the norm had long been for prospective teachers to complete a substantial amount of education coursework, including all teaching competencies, and take part in a practicum. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education determined and supervised the specific requirements for everyone seeking a full teaching certificate.
For its participants, the ABCTE program now controls significant aspects of the certification process previously under the purview of colleges of education and the state's education department. There's significantly less mandatory classroom time than the typical semester-long practicum for education students. ABCTE students are required to have a bachelor's degree, but not a teaching degree.
And the program developed the test its participants must pass to demonstrate competency, instead of one approved by the state board for traditional certification.
The idea that someone can be an effective public school teacher without taking the full range of coursework in teaching practices offered by college education departments has long been seen as an insult by many in the education establishment.
Gayle Wilkinson, co-director of a teacher certification program designed for career changers at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, remains skeptical of ABCTE.
"It may serve some people very well, but I don't see how taking a test will give the people experience that they are going to need to work with kids," she said. "With ABCTE graduates going into classroom cold, they are not going to be effective."
Previous efforts to broaden avenues for acquiring full certification to teach in public schools failed in the face of fierce opposition by the Missouri National Education Association and some school board organizations. The MNEA deems the new law a weakening of teaching standards. Prominent among the union's concerns is that full teacher certification can be awarded through ABCTE's program without completing a course of study that covers all key teaching competencies.
Otto Fajen, legislative director for the MNEA, said he is concerned that ABCTE-trained teachers won't have enough classroom training to deal with students with special needs.
"We've always said that the [ABCTE] test could be part of evaluating students," he said. "Our biggest criticism is that it's just a test, and we want to see a program that has significantly more training."
Saba defends the rigor of the program's testing, noting that the pass rate is only 40 percent. The program cites independent research showing that teacher retention is higher over the first three years for their graduates than the nationwide average. Critics have questioned the validity of this data.
The program, Saba argues, is one way to address the shortage of qualified math and science teachers going into urban school districts. Wilkinson said it's not a supply issue that plagues the St. Louis Public Schools, but rather a case of disillusioned teachers regularly dropping out.
Sharonica Hardin, the district's interim chief human resources officer, said the district often finds itself competing with other professional fields to lure people qualified to teach math and science.
Teacher Quality and Student Achievement
Fajen has called for the state's education department to analyze data correlating the certificate route taken with teacher retention and student outcomes.
Several recent national studies seem to support the view that limiting teacher certification to those who complete traditional teacher training programs doesn't contribute to student achievement.
A just-published U.S. Department of Education report found there to be no statistically significant difference in the achievement of students placed in classrooms with teachers receiving alternative versus traditional certification.
There was also no evidence that low levels of teacher training or education coursework reduced the effectiveness of teachers who received alternative certification - or that majoring in education enhanced teacher performance.
This conclusion is echoed in a recent study by Paul E. Peterson, director of the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, showing very little, if any, connection between a teacher's certification status and classroom effectiveness. Peterson claims that students attending schools in states with genuine alternative certification gained more on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) between 2003 and 2007 than did students in the other states.
Saba said the study results have given his effort "a tremendous lift."
But Wilkinson, who studies the effectiveness of alternative certification programs, said there's plenty of data showing that prospective teachers with more time in front of students fare better in the classroom once they begin teaching.
"There's no real way that people can say alternative programs are more or less effective, because there's too much variance among them," she said. Yet according to Peterson's study, scientific evidence that alternative certification produces less effective teachers than the traditional route "remains somewhere between scant and nonexistent."
Opponents of allowing teachers to become certified without college education degrees face some awkward facts about those who pursue such a route. Data from the Educational Testing Service show that both nationwide and in Missouri, people intending to enroll in undergraduate education programs score, on the average, near the very bottom of the list of 36 college majors in Scholastic Aptitude Test scores.
Results are similar when Graduate Record Exam scores of students applying to graduate education programs are compared to those of other fields.
All this matters, according to researchers from the Brookings Institution, because teacher scores on achievement tests have more frequently been correlated with student outcomes than other attributes.
For Hire?
Game time for ABCTE graduates will come sometime between now and late summer, when districts gauge the applicant pool and make their hires.
Mary Muckler, director of human resources for the Parkway School District, said the performance of the first ABCTE teachers they hire full time will give them an indication of what to expect from the program.
Parkway has already hired substitutes from the alternative program, and Muckler said she's received a handful of inquiries from ABCTE students about jobs.
"We will be selective. There is a flood of applicants from colleges and universities that are all competing for jobs," Muckler said, adding that the district would be interested in hiring ABCTE graduates for hard-to-fill positions in calculus, physics, chemistry and biology.
Cathy Vespereny, spokeswoman for the Webster Groves School District, said that while ABCTE graduates would be considered for openings, "right now the pool of certified teachers we get for every opening is huge. It's extremely competitive."
Muckler said she is concerned that ABCTE's 60-hour observation requirement is far less time than a traditional student-teacher would have in the classroom.
Hardin, the interim chief human resources officer for St. Louis Public Schools, said her district is still waiting for a definitive response from the state as to whether ABCTE graduates are considered "highly qualified" under No Child Left Behind.
She said the district hasn't had official applicants from the program but has received inquiries.
"I can't give a blanket answer about our hiring decisions, because we are just looking for the best fit," Hardin said.
That's a common answer from human resources directors. Officials at both the Rockwood and St. Charles School Districts said they would hire the candidate with the most knowledge and skills, regardless of certification route.
Still, Saba said he expects some graduates to have a hard time finding a job given the current economic downturn. Lindbergh School District, for instance, will likely be unable to hire new teachers for next year.
Before she started the program, Leach, the prospective teacher, researched ABCTE with some skepticism. "My big thing I asked was, 'is this something that school districts will like?' I've never done anything in education for $850."
She met with several district officials who all seemed open to hiring graduates from the alternative program. "No one had anything derogatory to say about the program. What I'm hearing is that it's fair game for everyone." Leach said she's enjoying the program. "Like anything you have to have self-discipline," she said.
When it comes time to apply for jobs, Leach said she'd consider both public and private schools. She's determined, however, to stick to teaching math.
"I want to go into something that's high demand," she said.