RALEIGH – The new Working Group on Teacher Licensure and Retention, created as part of a compromise between Gov. Mike Easley and legislative leaders to avoid a veto override, began its work Wednesday by downplaying the potential effects of loosening certification rules. On this point alone, if not others, I am entirely in agreement.
The standoff between Easley, who vetoed a bill making it easier for out-of-state teachers to obtain certification, and the General Assembly, who had the votes but not the will to override the governor’s veto, is in a sense beside the point. I’m not saying that the bill was not significant. Indeed, I thought it was a good idea. But once we confine the debate to the matter of how best the state should control the composition of the teaching profession, we’ve lost sight of the larger issue.
School administrators, principals, and ultimately parents themselves should have the power to decide who will teach. They know best who is performing and who is not. The reasons for statewide regulation of the profession are at least two-fold: 1) as an indirect means of improving student achievement and 2) as a means of protecting a unionized workforce from competition. Neither is persuasive upon reflection.
Policymakers may think they are improving education by requiring Ed School courses or teacher testing, but there is scant evidence of a relationship between these measures and better student outcomes. And there are about as many theories about how to teach individual students effectively as there are theorists. I’m not saying that no best practices exist, only that the best means of discovering them for particular schools and classrooms is not a certification process. It is a competitive market in which parents and educators have choices in where and how children will be educated, and an effective means of communicating failures and successes among both groups.
Certification is a blunderbuss on a firing range. In practice, it allows a mixture of excellent, competent, mediocre, and horrendous teachers to enter and remain in the state’s classrooms, while excluding a different set of potentially excellent, competent, mediocre, and horrendous teachers from the profession. It is a poor substitute for training teachers how to carry out a specific school’s education mission and then evaluating them on the basis of performance.
At least the first purported justification for certification reflects good intentions. The second is self-serving. Unions often push for regulations that limit potential competition to an incumbent workforce. If everyone has to jump through the same hoops to get a job, it ensures the job security of those who’ve already done so. It also makes it easier to push for higher pay and better benefits because employers’ options are constrained.
Given the circumstances, it is certainly worth pushing for at least modest changes in the certification process to give schools more leeway in hiring and retaining teachers. The long-run goal, however, should be much more ambitious: to transfer entirely the authority to decide who will be a teacher to those in the best position to do so. That means school administrators, seeking to maintain or expand their clientele, and parents, seeking the best education possible for their children.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.