To have long-term prosperity, a country needs good schools. And it’s hard to have good schools without good teachers. And teaching effectively is, in turn, hard. Also hard is getting certification to teach. But, interestingly, the evidence suggests that there’s little correlation between the effectiveness of a teacher and whether he or she came through a standard certification program or one of the many “alternative certification” programs that exist around the country. Thus, there’s good reason to think that, as Robin Chait and Michele McLaughlin write, “These programs are among the most promising strategies for expanding the pipeline of talented teachers, particularly for subject shortage areas and high-needs schools.” But though alternative certification programs exist in all 50 states, in many states they’re not very robust and/or there’s no clear vision of how what’s already in place could be expanded and built upon. How to do that is the subject of their paper, but at the event CAP hosted based around the paper skepticism focused on the idea that alternatively certified teachers don’t stay in the profession long enough:
Richelle Patterson, senior policy analyst at the National Education Association, echoed concerns about the readiness of many alternatively certified teachers. She called traditional teacher training programs “career-starters,” and said that many alternative certification programs lead to a “revolving door.”
This just doesn’t seem like a huge problem to me. Evidence suggests that teachers improve their skills in their first couple of years in the classroom but that after that, additional experience doesn’t do a great deal to improve performance. So while there’s nothing wrong with veteran teachers, it’s not particularly crucial to get people to make a life-long commitment to teaching. And of course people who teach for a couple of years and find that they don’t have a taste for it should be encouraged to leave, not encouraged to stay.
More broadly, we’ve moved over the past 20–30 years to a much more flexible employment market. It’s less common than it once was for people to stay in the same job for long stretches of time, and more common for people to switch fields. In principle, this could be an opportunity for schools to pick up mid-career professionals who decide there’s something appealing about a teacher’s work schedule or who are suffering from structural shifts in the economy but still have the kind of basic subject-matter knowledge that could be the basis for effective teaching. Even if the economy recovers robustly, for example, there are going to be sectoral shifts involved and plenty of people with math and science skills who were working in finance or automotive engineering will need new jobs. Some sub-set of those people would probably make good math or science teachers. And conversely, there may be young people who are interested in teaching and potentially good at it but who just aren’t sure they want to commit to a lifetime in the field. This is a labor market that it would be good to tap. Unfortunately, the structure of current pension policies discourages that. And so does a mentality that says no pathway into the profession can be a good one unless it produces someone who’ll keep teaching for decades. But we should be moving in the opposite direction — more flexible pensions that let people change jobs, and more encouragement of “alternative” teachers.
Another thing I would note is that there’s “revolving” and then there’s revolving. A friend of mine in college did Teach for America for a couple of years, then revolved out the door to a position with a state Department of Education, then revolved to a teaching job in a different city, and now is an administrator at a charter school serving low-income kids in Boston. In this case, it’s true that her stay in the first school was likely too short-term for her students to benefit from peak-effectiveness teaching (but then again, it’s not as if highly skilled teachers had been clamoring for positions in high-poverty schools in the urban south and getting displaced by TFA kids), but it’s definitely wrong to portray her as a dilettante who just ducked in-and-out of education for two years. There’s an enduring benefit to bringing people into the general field of education and working in troubled districts that’s independent of the issue of how long someone stays in the exact position they were placed in.