Since the appellate court ruling that may or may not ultimately affect homeschooling, there is some conversation going on about having a teaching credential. I’ve seen comments on news articles and on blogs that basically ask why we don’t all go get a teaching credential and not worry about it.

I have some thoughts about this. At one time, I held a CLEAR credential, which was the credential I needed at the time to work as a speech pathologist in a public school. I have not renewed it in several years, and I don’t intend to do so. I’m still the same person, I still possess the same skills whether I have that paper or not.

Having a credential does not automatically guarantee that a person is going to be able to teach well. It does not ensure morality, dedication, good character, punctuality, patriotism or any other values that we as a society may deem appropriate for teachers. There are certain skills that cannot be taught. Good moral character comes to mind as an example.

As far as I know, most of my education was conducted by credentialed teachers. There were a few interns along the way, but those were largely the exception. Let me give you a few of the highlights of my education.

On the good side, I had a teacher in Jr. High who motivated me, not only in the 2 years I spent in his class, but for many years afterward. I was blessed to have known him and to call Don Graham my friend. I think I learned more from this one teacher than from any other. I was in college before I faced the academic rigor that Mr. Graham expected of his 7th and 8th grade students.

Also in Jr. High, I had a credentialed band teacher who routinely made detailed remarks about my physical development to me and about me to the boys in the class. It was not the sort of “teacher approval” I was looking for. I begged to get out of band–and I finally did–but I was too embarrassed to say why. It was years before I signed up to be in band in high school.

And speaking of high school, I had one credentialed teacher who sat with his feet propped up on the desk reading the paper, day in and day out. It was a weekly paper, there wasn’t that much to read. At the beginning of the week he told us the chapters to read. On Fridays we had tests. That was it. Sometimes he pulled his eyebrows down to his cheekbones and made faces at the class.

I got an A in my high school computer class because I was able to program in some code that nobody could figure out, including the instructor. I couldn’t figure it out either, which I was very clear about, but that didn’t matter. I’d done something different, even though it was by accident, and that was enough to impress the credentialed teacher who came in each morning smelling faintly of alcohol.

I could go on, but you get the idea. A credential does not guarantee that someone is going to be even an adequate teacher.

I came across some interesting blogs on the subject today, and wanted to share a bit of that information here. At Townhall.com, Walter E. Williams writes about Academic Slums.

Mr. Williams has this to say about improving our public education system:

American education will never be improved until we address one of the problems seen as too delicate to discuss. That problem is the overall quality of people teaching our children. Students who have chosen education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any other major. Students who have graduated with an education degree earn lower scores than any other major on graduate school admissions tests such as the GRE, MCAT or LSAT. Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university. As such, they are home to the least able students and professors with the lowest academic respect. Were we serious about efforts to improve public education, one of the first things we would do is eliminate schools of education.

 Time for another revelation here. I’ve taught adults who are in the process of getting a teaching credential. Some of them were brilliant. They could take the tiniest morsel of information and apply it in different ways depending on the situation presented. Others, not so much. Actually, not at all. Many made it explicitly clear that they were marking time and enduring my class because it was on the list. They wanted multiple guess tests or word-for-word regurgitation of facts. No critical thinking–it was too time consuming and they were too busy.

That brings me to another great post by Amanda Witt at Wittingshire. She writes:

For several years I taught a graduate-level writing course for public school teachers who were working on master’s degrees in Administration–that is, they were aiming to become principals and superintendents.

These teachers needed my class. Some of them were good writers coming in, but many of them simply could not communicate clearly in written form. At the end of each course, many of these men and women thanked me profusely. One told me, sheepishly, than he’d gone from thinking my class was the least important one in his training, to thinking it was the most important.

I have a Ph.D.

I taught the teachers.

And yet, by law, I am not “qualified” to walk into a high school and teach their students.

Seems reasonable, huh?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Home Schooling, Parenting, Public Education, education, homeschool, homeschooling in California, parental responsibility, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.