This new legislation amends/replaces No Child Left Behind. One of it's provisions allows for the reduction of qualifications for new teachers including the creation of "Teacher Academies" that can be entirely online training programs. Completion of the Teacher Academy program will be seen as equivalent to a Masters degree in Education. This new education law could lower teacher standards - Business Insider
This is a clear effort to reduce salaries for teachers as well. Once you low the barriers of entry to the profession, you will have an army of people willing to work for less. Similar efforts are being conducted in Canada at the University level. Several universities have created new positions that require more teaching and less research with considerably lower pays. The idea is to get more teachers for the same budget. The argument was that people with MS could qualify but given the PhD glut, PhD people are getting these positions but at a lower pay. At the end, it is a matter of budget cuts in education.
This makes no difference for Texas and the many other states that don't require a master's degree to teach K-12. This also doesn't make much of a difference in states that allow alternative teacher certification programs outside of universities. In the alternative teacher certification program I was in briefly, only 30 observation hours were required because that's what's required by the state. The rest of the program is online. After that, the person teaches on a provisional license for a school year for with a mentor. This is similar to how alternative teacher certification programs work in other states, and it's been like this for years. What is more disturbing is that a couple of states have allowed for the hiring of people with no degree to address a severe teacher shortage. This is outside the control of the federal government. There are plenty of unemployed and underemployed people with bachelor's degrees who can teach, but they choose not to. The states need to address the reason why so many people don't want to teach rather than lower the standards to hire people with high school diplomas who are happy to get anything outside of the restaurant and retail industries. One state with a severe shortage has exceptionally low teacher salaries; that's why people don't want to become teachers there. In addition, people don't want to be held responsible for children who have no interest in learning and don't have parents who will instill that value in them.
omgosh....really? The TEACHERS need more education? Here's a plan, can we just friggin teach the kids how to read, write, and do math? Enough with the pedagogy already.
When I was in the first grade I couldn't read. Neither could my classmates. We wrote word lists and a standardized test indicated that we were all literate. But we couldn't pick up a book an actually read it. My mother went to the school where the teacher rather condescendingly told her that she knew more about educating kids than a secretary. My mother went to the teacher supply store, bought a reading program, sat with me nightly and by the end of the year I was reading exceptionally well. So well, in fact, that I blew the next round of standardized tests out of the water and my teacher smugly said to me "I guess you can tell your mother I knew what I was doing all along." I think there are two lessons in those events. The first is that school is only part of the education equation and parents can, and should, play a role in educating their kids rather than just dropping their kids off at school like they are leaving their car for an oil change. The second is that K-12 education in this country has become so entwined with standardized testing that we don't care if kids actually have skills we just want them to score on a test. One of the key problems with the second thing is that it interferes with the first thing. If a kid's goal is only to fill in a bubble sheet then society is saying it doesn't care about all sorts of other skills beyond the curriculum. So we have a system where the schools just want kids to be little test monkeys and teachers to be a combination of babysitters/test prep instructors. And we have teachers wanting to approach the situation as quasi-psychologists. So, yeah, let's just teach the kids to read and write and do math. Let's also teach them about music and art. Let's let them run outside and learn how to compete in organized sports activities. Let's shut down the college board cartel and stop buying into the religion that Sylvan and Kaplan have created. Let's just teach the kids how to learn stuff rather than how to hate school and maybe our society won't nose dive into a volcano within the next few generations.
Given that the article's authors are professors at a university school of education, and these academies would be their direct competitors, they're hardly the most unbiased of commentators.
I'm not sure how that works in real life because most of the teachers where I live belong to unions and I think they have the salary structure pretty much locked up in their collective bargaining agreements.
State governments can and have weakened teachers' unions. Those collective bargaining agreements also have to be renegotiated when they expire. I don't know how long they typically last. In law enforcement, collective bargaining agreements are often only good for two to four years.
