Wanted: Teachers and more teachersA statewide shortage has led districts to hire more candidates without traditional qualifications. By David Damron and Mary Shanklin Originally published on April 18, 2004 Florida's scramble for thousands of new teachers has opened the schoolhouse door for a new kind of recruit: one with no education degree, classroom experience or college-honed teaching skills. Hundreds of middle-age career shifters and college graduates who never studied teaching are working in classrooms across the state, more the products of night school than colleges of education. These newly minted instructors often teach children by day, then learn the basics of the job at night and on weekends. Florida leads the nation in promoting such "alternative certification" for teachers -- the name given to efforts at recruiting prospective teachers from the ranks of other occupations. Every district was required this year to offer on-the-job training programs. Defenders of such programs say Florida has little choice, facing growth and class-size pressures that have boosted the demand for new teachers by 75 percent in the past decade. The state needed more than 16,000 new teachers this year, yet Florida colleges of education produce only 6,000 new grads annually. Part of that gap has been filled with out-of-state teachers, but several thousand jobs go unfilled, proponents say. With good training, they contend, there's no evidence that a lack of traditional teaching qualifications results in children being shortchanged. Still, the state has little information so far on how well this experiment is working. New Florida teachers already complain that their college-level training did not fully prepare them to teach such crucial subjects as reading, a 2003 Florida State University survey found. So as districts turn increasingly to teachers with unconventional training, the effect on students is unclear. "That's where the fundamental debate lies nationally right now," said Sande Milton, an FSU education professor studying the influx of teachers from other fields. "Is this a professionally responsible thing to do?" Deans at colleges of education say the trend may expand as toughened course requirements for education undergrads discourage even more students from taking the traditional college route to teaching. As much as anywhere in America, Florida is rewriting its book on how to teach teachers to teach. Take Jeff Davis, for example. A "floater" who teaches history and economics at Apopka High School, he carries his teaching materials on his back from portable classroom to portable classroom. Davis, 37, left a fitness business a few years ago to become a teacher, arriving without the academic baggage that college of education graduates carry. His 1998 degree from the University of Central Florida is in political science. "It was a shock," Davis said of his first year on the job, despite previous substitute work. "Overwhelming." Despite the odd circumstances -- no fixed class of his own -- Davis still learns as he goes, relying on tips from mentors and an after-school alternative-certification program offered by the Orange County Public Schools. It's his second year in the program. The eight-week after-school class costs him $800, but he said it helps him manage students, classes and his schedule. But it didn't erase the unknowns he and others in his alternative-teaching classes faced: "Everybody was pretty shocked. It's like nothing we've done before," Davis said. More and more, teachers are arriving to class this way. Teachers trained by Florida's education colleges follow a prescribed course of study over four years and then take certification exams to prove their ability. Fledgling teachers typically serve three internships in schools, practicing their skills with children. By their last semester, they are supposed to be leading a class at least part time. They graduate with education degrees and specialized training that are supposed to make them ready for class on their first day of work. Alternative certification, however, opens the field to college grads with degrees in other disciplines -- including those far removed from education. After passing a general-education exam or another in the subject they wish to teach, these new teachers may take college courses at night or attend short, intensive courses on instruction offered at the district level. While they polish their classroom skills, they continue to teach during the day. In Orange County, one of Florida's largest school districts, the number of teachers coming in through the alternative-certification door is exploding. In the 2000-01 school year, 38 teachers were in the program. It spiked to 247 this year, a 550 percent increase. More are expected next year, officials say. Newer programs in other Central Florida counties are much smaller -- 21 teachers in Volusia, 13 in Seminole and two in Lake, for example -- but administrators expect these to grow exponentially in the next few years. Osceola County has no one in its alternative-certification program at the moment, but it one-ups the others by offering scholarships to dozens of school-district workers who want to study for education degrees through the University of Central Florida. Program backers like to point to the engineers, attorneys and scientists who are becoming teachers. But overall, few people enter teaching from that "real world." About 60 percent of alternatively certified teachers in Florida come from education-related fields, a 2003 study by the Florida Department of Education shows. Kizzy Caldwell is typical. She works with at-risk youth at the Devereux Residential Treatment Center in Orlando and volunteers in her daughter's Tangelo Park Elementary kindergarten class. Caldwell, 27, was close to earning a psychology degree at UCF when she decided she really wanted to teach. She didn't want to spend thousands of dollars and more time turning her academic train around to get a new degree. So Caldwell will go the alternative-certification route. With all her experience with children, Caldwell sees no reason to turn her college path toward a school career. "That's just even more money." Far from luring altruistic scientists willing to ditch a high salary to mold young minds, Florida's push to aggressively train less-experienced teachers is attracting many average citizens who feel drawn to the classroom. State officials are betting it's the way to go. "It's not the end-all, be-all way to train teachers," Gov. Jeb Bush said recently of conventional degree programs, defending the alternative process. "You can't determine who the good teachers are based on where they came from." Not that Florida has a lot of options. A class-size amendment that voters endorsed in 2002 created an immediate and rising demand for new teachers needed to manage a larger number of smaller classes. Other trends also have driven up demand for teachers. The state's retirement incentive program, called DROP, has doubled the number of educators retiring in the past two years. Teacher turnover is another culprit. In 2002, almost 10 percent of teachers left the classroom, according to a state DOE report released in November. The federal government's No Child Left Behind Act will demand even more new instructors, experts predict. That legislation requires all teachers to be qualified to teach their subject areas by 2007, leaving districts less flexibility in assigning teachers to subjects where they have no background.But Florida colleges of education just can't keep up. Partly because of space constraints, universities produce about 6,000 classroom candidates -- the same number as they did in the mid-1990s. Furthermore, only 50 percent to 60 percent of college of education graduates take public-school jobs. Many leave the state or get higher-paying private-school posts, leaving about 3,000-4,000 college of education graduates to try to fill what will soon be 20,000 new public-school openings, an expert predicted. "I worry about the quality of the other 16,000 teachers we're hiring," said Katherine Kasten, the University of North Florida College of Education dean. "That would keep me up at night. Some of them are sadly underqualified, and they are not going to last long," Kasten predicted. "It's going to be a revolving door, and our children are not going to be well served." Florida already has a low bar for many teachers. Compared with districts in other states, Florida's school systems require few credentials from their teachers, according to 2003-04 Education State Rankings by Morgan Quitno Press. Florida ranked last among the 50 states in the percentage of school districts that required teachers to graduate from a state-approved teacher-preparation program in 2000. Florida also had the lowest percentage of school districts that required teachers to have a certificate, major or minor in the field they teach. Education deans typically blame the dearth of education graduates on colleges that have not expanded, relatively flat state funding and recent state mandates requiring college of education students take an added set of core classes. "The rule," as some refer to it, requires students stay a costly extra semester or two for courses they may not really need, said Sandra Robinson, dean of the University of Central Florida's education college. "It's like asking a future high-school English literature teacher to take another geometry course, when what they might need is more in-class work," Robinson said. Yet while the state ratcheted up demands on education students, alternate teaching programs haven't similarly raised their standards, she said. Part of rising standards for college-trained teachers has been a focus on reading instruction. College curricula, for instance, include basic and advanced literacy courses aimed at helping children master the reading skills they need to learn. It's unclear whether teachers from the alternative ranks are being exposed to similar techniques in their training, particularly because many teach older children who already are supposed to read well. Davis, the Apopka High "floater," said he occasionally finds students with reading challenges but said he has not been exposed to literacy techniques so far in his alternative-certification classes. Former marketer Jessica Moore, 29, said the alternative-certification class she's about to finish included little or nothing on literacy training. But other required new-teacher training introduced her to reading comprehension and memory strategies she uses to teach reading to seventh-graders at Hunter's Creek Middle School. Moore teaches students real-world applications -- such as how to read medicine bottles, movie schedules and road signs -- and found that her business experience and master's degree adequately equipped her for the job. "I'm more equipped than the ones jumping out of the [college of education] classrooms," said Moore, who has a communications degree from FSU and a Rollins College master's degree in corporate communications and technology. Researchers of alternative certification say that second-career teachers may not have years of teacher training, but they often bring real-world experiences with them that can enrich a classroom. Intense job training and guidance from mentors are key to success, and many of the larger and older programs in place now appear to work, proponents of the alternative route say. California, New Jersey and Texas were some of the first states to open accelerated pathways to get alternative teaching credentials in the mid-1980s. Today, 46 states offer it and Florida is at the forefront, according to the National Center for Education Information in Washington. C. Emily Feistritzer, president and founder of the center, has monitored such certification programs for 22 years and said no long-term or wide-ranging studies have compared on-the-job trained teachers to traditionally trained instructors. Recent spot studies in California and Texas show alternative teachers perform as well, or in some cases, better than traditional instructors. "There's no evidence whatsoever children are being damaged," she said. But Harvard researcher Heather Peske said the performance of alternatively certified teachers is not proven. "The debate is very vitriolic," said Peske, whose own survey shows "the research is very mixed" as to whether traditional teachers perform better or stay in the job longer, she said. In Florida, FSU's Milton is working with state education officials on a study due out later this year that will be one of the first to compare test scores of students from both categories of teachers. At this point, he said, the state has minimal information on the alternatively certified, even down to how many are working in classrooms today, he said. Florida started late in the alternative-certification game, but now it's far ahead, both in aggressively pushing these teachers into classes and in pushing tests of their success, Milton and Feistritzer said. Since many parts of the nation face similar teacher shortages, Florida could help shape the educational makeup of America's next generation of classroom leaders. "Your state is really being closely watched," said Feistritzer. "All eyes are on Florida." David Damron can be reached at ddamron@orlandosentinel.com and
407-420-5311. Mary Shanklin can be reached at mshanklin@orlandosentinel.com or
407-420- 5538. www.orlandosentinel.com |
