Alternative Teacher Education Programs: Band-Aid or Antidote?

The number of teacher shortages in the United States has fluctuated without discernible pattern since public education began. Sometimes teachers leave in droves because of curriculum changes, other times because of retirement, or as the public may soon experience, because of new curriculum and testing mandates. Many realize how the instability in the number of experienced educational professionals impacts America’s learners and are consistently trying to remedy the problem by offering alternative teacher education programs to get educated, enthusiastic, qualified individuals into classrooms as quickly as possible. In fact, some studies claim that educators from nontraditional teacher education training programs are better candidates for teaching positions because statistics show that education majors tend to have the lowest SAT scores of all college-bound high school seniors (Blumenreich & Rhodes, 2007).

Policy makers in education have noticed this and see alternative route credentialing as a preferable option to the hiring of what they believe to be mediocre candidates from traditional education programs. This has led to the creation of programs specifically meant to recruit and train non-education major graduates from elite schools for jobs in public education. Researchers are even beginning to publish information suggesting that pedagogy and training time does not matter as much in teacher effectiveness as does a desire for social justice; these researchers claim that a study on a teacher’s motivations for teaching would be more telling about the effectiveness of alternative teacher education programs since many who join do so because they deeply believe that they can make a difference in public education in the United States (Blumenreich & Rhodes, 2007). Such programs exist on district, state, and national levels; two of the most popular programs are Teach for America and Teach-Now. Since its inception in 1990, Teach for America has grown from only 500 corps members to over 14,000 alumni; currently, there are 3,500 active members teaching in 1,000 schools in 22 different regions of the United States. This alternative teacher education program known for its brief preparation time and organizational flexibility boasts over 14,000 alumni, many of whom remain in education in some capacity today. Supporters of alternative teacher education programs praise its success with recruiting top students from prestigious universities into the public education arena. In fact, in the 2011-2012 school year, 19,000 students from universities including Dartmouth, Yale, and Spelman applied for only 2,400 Teach for America positions (Teach for America, 2011). Teach Now is another organization providing alternative routes for individuals who want to become teachers. Established in 2003 thanks to a discretionary grant from the United States Department of Education, this organization prides itself in being a “…one-stop, comprehensive clearinghouse for information about alternative routes to [teacher] certification in the United States” (National Center for Educational Information, 2008). It claims to provide immediate answers to questions and guidance not only for individuals interested in becoming teachers, but also for policymakers, legislators, educators, researchers, and members of the general public. Its website offers a page for research which includes many university publications citing the effectiveness of alternative teacher certification programs (National Center for Educational Information, 2008). Many professional education organizations, such as the National Education Association, argue for the benefits of such accelerated programs. Some of these benefits, according to recent studies, include that these programs have very close relationships with the school districts their members serve. Also, these alternative teacher preparation courses are praised for their vigorous training and screening processes, their resilient mentoring of participants as they are teaching, a solid curriculum with an intense focus on basic, research-based teaching strategies, and abundant, applicable training for participants before they enter a classroom (National Education Association (2013). When researchers compare student achievement levels between teachers who completed their certification processes through traditional programs to educators who chose an alternative route, they claim to find larger gains with the later: “Regarding the effectiveness of alternative routes versus traditional certification programs, Linda Darling-Hammond et al.'s research on Teach for America recruits finds that those ‘who become certified after 2 or 3 years do about as well as other certified teachers in supporting student achievement gains; however, nearly all of them leave within three years. Teachers' effectiveness appears strongly related to the preparation they have received for teaching’” (Blumenriech & Rhodes, 2007).

Public education policy makers have been so pleased with the student achievement gains from educators with alternative teacher education programs such as Teach for America that currently, 47 states and the District of Columbia have implemented their own variations of this model to address teacher shortages at state and district levels. These programs often involve partnerships with colleges and universities and claim to save money due to shortened preparation times and organizational flexibility. They provide shortened training periods for recruits by allowing them to bypass traditional teacher education program requirements such as student teaching and thus offer an unhindered entry into classrooms (Blumenriech & Rhodes, 2007). Despite the spread of alternative teacher education programs and the idea that they capture the attention of college seniors wishing to make a difference in the world, some teacher educators, politicians, and policy makers worry about the ramifications of placing teachers without education degrees and traditional teaching credentials in some of the neediest classrooms in the country. They continuously seek to discover whether or not these programs really help the students they are intended to serve. These critics believe that uncertified teachers have felt less prepared and have less of a sense of efficacy in the classroom than teachers brought into the profession through traditional teacher education programs. They also maintain that alternative programs fail to provide the appropriate knowledge base for teachers, the same knowledge base they believe is provided by the most excellent, traditional teacher education programs in the United States. According to this opposing side of the debate, traditional teacher education programs teach this knowledge base and help educators transform their ways of knowing about pedagogy in and the world. In fact, teacher educators, politicians, and even administrators who are in favor of tightening current regulations for teacher certification processes also contend that certified teachers have a greater impact on student achievement than their uncertified counterparts. A final argument against alternative teacher education programs is that it completely undermines the “professionalization” of the teaching career; there are no alternative programs for lawyers, doctors, and other professionals (National Education Association, 2013).

Despite these arguments, proponents of alternative licensure programs resist these claims, which they believe are more focused on the adults involved rather than the students, and rebut that if a traditional certification route makes teachers more effective, then alternatively certified teachers, who are not required to take as many education courses as traditionally prepared teachers, should be less productive (Sass, 2011). Many continue the argument by questioning whether or not publication would be in as much turmoil today if this was actually the case. In the 1985-86 academic year, less than 300 teachers in the United States obtained teaching certificates through routes other than completing a traditional teacher preparation program. Two decades later, in 2005/06, the number of teacher teachers who obtained teaching certificates through alternate routes exploded to 59,000 (Sass, 2011). With such statistics, this issue will not be ignored; if these trends continue, the debate over teacher education programs is likely to continue for years due to teacher shortages and American public education reform; some researchers are beginning to publish concerns and praises for both teacher training systems. These researchers believe that in order to delve deeply into program evaluation and fairly compare the efficacy of the two methods, researchers should focus less on the comparison of student outcomes; conversation surrounding this issue should be on the identification of the “essential ingredients” of effective teacher preparation. Also, these researchers are beginning to establish the paradigm that teacher motivation has a larger impact on an educator’s successfulness than knowledge of pedagogy or time spent training (Blumenreich & Rhodes). Thus, if a teacher truly desires to make a difference in the lives of students, he or she will continuously try to improve his or her practices, despite his or her educational background. References Blumenreich, M., Rhodes, L. & Lori (2007): Lessons from Teach for America Alumni: A Review of In the Deep Heart's Core, by Michael Johnston; Lessons to Learn: Voices from the Front Lines of Teach for America, by Molly Ness; Taught by America: A Story of Struggle and Hope in Compton, by Sarah Sentilles, The New Educator, 3:3, 263-281. National Center for Education Information (2008). The national center for alternative certification: About us. Retrieved from http://www.teach-now.org/aboutncac.cfm National Education Association. (2013). Research spotlight on alternative routes to teacher certification: NEA reviews of the research in best practices in education. Retrieved from http://www.nea.org/tools/16578.htm Sass, T. (2011). Certification requirements and teacher quality: A comparison of alternative routes to teaching. Retrieved from http://www.learningfront.com/Media/Alternative_Certification_and_Teacher_Quality_11.pdf Teach for America (2012). Teach for America: Our mission- a solvable problem. Retrieved from http://www.learningfront.com/Media/Alternative_Certification_and_Teacher_Quality_11.pdf