K-12 Education Needs Intellectual Diversity Too
Colleges nationwide have recently been buffeted by debates regarding academic freedom. Republican-led states have targeted diversity programs in universities, and a new law in Indiana even requires professors in public universities to foster a culture of “intellectual diversity.” K-12 education desperately needs diversity as well, but a few recent conversations I’ve had with actual teachers convince me that diversity can best be achieved by relaxing the accreditation process altogether.
Alanna, for instance, was an exceptional first-grade teacher. Her students loved her. Her administrators respected her. She routinely designed creative interventions for students in reading, spelling, writing, and even mathematics that drew upon her experience working with non-native English speakers in Japan. She did not miss a single day of school all year.
But Alanna’s teaching career was almost grounded before it began. Though she earned a college degree, Alanna did not have a teaching license and was therefore prohibited from teaching at most schools. She eventually found a job at a charter school that did not require certification, but her state’s regulations required her to pass a series of licensure exams covering material mostly unrelated to the first-grade curriculum. Preparation for these exams monopolized the precious time Alanna might have spent actually doing the work of teaching or pursuing her own mental and physical health.
Alanna survived her first year in the classroom and is thriving as a teacher, but she came close to walking away from the profession altogether.
Since the late 1800s, teaching in the United States has been a heavily gatekept profession, with teacher certification serving as the litmus test for determining who is allowed into the classroom. Despite a multi-year, nationwide teacher shortage that ought to have prompted creative solutions for attracting new talent to the profession, many policymakers still draw an absurdly hard line in the sand regarding teacher certification. Uncredentialed teachers are often seen as inferior educators and excluded from the pool of acceptable teaching candidates.
While certification might be the simplest and most immediate metric for teacher evaluation, a growing body of research shows that uncertified teachers can be just as effective in the classroom as their certified counterparts, painting a far more complex picture than many educational gatekeepers are willing to admit. That was the case with another teacher I spoke to, named Bri.
Like Alanna, Bri had no formal certification but was hired as a second-grade teacher at a charter school in her rural town. While her temporary licensure allowed her to enter the classroom immediately, she was also required to go back to school to get an education degree, forcing her to spend her nights and weekends taking online courses that drained her already-thin temporal and financial resources.
Although it took time for her to adjust to the demands of teaching, Bri’s familiarity with the local culture helped her to develop deep relationships with her students, and her prior professional experiences prepared her for the logistical aspects of teaching. Though she worked herself to the brink of exhaustion several times, Bri persevered, describing her work as “the most fulfilling job [she’d] ever had.”
All teachers, especially uncertified teachers, should be evaluated as holistically as possible, according to their character, backgrounds, and prior experiences. Neither Bri nor Alanna followed a traditional pathway into the classroom, and yet their success stories can be directly attributed to their non-traditional pre-professional experiences. The story of Carina, a third uncertified teacher, confirms that teaching expertise can be acquired from a variety of sources.
Carina was hired to teach elementary music at an urban, dual-language school despite never attending college at all. Prior to teaching, she was a professional musician, directing a 13-piece Mariachi band that was routinely voted among the best in the city. Due to her lack of certification, she was forced to jump through a number of administrative hoops to enter the classroom, including taking online courses, passing temporary certification exams, and even serving as the lunch monitor at the school to be eligible for health insurance. Still, Carina had what no certification program could teach – a love of music and a passion for spreading that love to the next generation.
As a teacher, Carina was determined to bring her music into her community, and she invited her “little Mariachis” into a classroom that drew on the emotion of Mariachi culture as a source of inspiration for her students. Her students studied, composed, practiced, and performed Mariachi music, and at their end-of-semester concert, multiple parents came up to her in tears, proud of their children and thankful for the educational environment she helped to provide.
Traditional ed-school certification may provide preparation for teaching, but it is not the only pathway that holds merit. Some teachers are assets in the classroom precisely because of their alternative preparation: Alanna’s creative phonics instruction stemmed from her unique experience teaching English language arts in Japan; Bri’s poise in the classroom was a direct result of her wide range of prior professional experiences; and Carina’s passion for her subject came from a lifetime of dedication to her craft.
Acknowledging that a good teacher can come from diverse backgrounds should cause us to reconsider some of our current educational policies. First and foremost, we should empower school leaders, who are intimately familiar with the needs of their particular schools, to make prudential hiring decisions regardless of certification status. Many of the qualities that contributed most to the success of the teachers in the stories above – specific content knowledge, school mission alignment, familiarity with the community and culture, love for students, etc. – cannot be quantified by any certification.
Second, we should consider reforms that alleviate burdens placed on the early-career alternatively prepared teachers who do enter the classroom. Considering the number of obligations already required of first-year teachers, a better policy would limit the administrative hoops – online classes, state-mandated exams, logistical obligations, professional development responsibilities, etc. – which drain precious resources from an already at-risk group of teachers.
Lastly, to inspire teachers like Alanna, Bri, and Carina to enter the classroom and to retain them once they join the profession, we ought to divert resources away from programs that evaluate the effectiveness of alternatively prepared teachers and towards programs that recruit, advocate for, and assist these particularly vulnerable teachers in their first year in the classroom. Given the difference that mentorship, support, affirmation, and advocation seem to make for teachers like Bri, we ought to turn our attention from whether alternatively-prepared teachers should be in the classroom to focus instead on how we can keep them there.
Though an unlikely source of wisdom, the Pixar film Ratatouille ends with an apt affirmation of both the rarity and the ubiquity of art: “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” Having been moved by the stories of Alanna, Bri, and Carina, we find that teaching – an art form in itself – might benefit from a similar insight: not everyone can become a great teacher, but a great teacher can come from anywhere.
As such, let’s remove the barriers between talented teaching candidates and the classrooms that need them.
