George Leef has a post this morning about teacher testing, and I must disagree with his findings.
Noting a Martin Center article that argues against a North Carolina effort to remove tests from the teacher certification pipeline, Leef writes:
So this state agency wants to dump the objective test that has long been used to decide which teacher candidates should be allowed in front of a classroom. The reason? The mania for diversity that we find everywhere in the field of education these days. Warta continues: “NCACTE recently explained its concerns about standardized tests, stating, ‘Entry and licensure exams serve as barriers to placing more teachers, particularly more diverse teachers, in classrooms.’ In other words, NCACTE doesn’t believe that its ‘diverse’ teacher candidates can succeed when faced with objective measures of preparedness.”
Many teachers are weakly prepared as it is. This change would make matters worse.
Respectfully, all that should be required to teach in a government school is a four-year degree and a background check. If candidates wish to give themselves a competitive edge by testing for competency, more power to those prospective teachers. But Praxis, Pearson, and the rest of them cost real money ($300+) that many don’t have. When my wife was grinding through the slew of post-graduation requirements to become qualified to teach in Wisconsin, we were shelling out hundreds of dollars so she could check off items on bureaucratic checklists. Time costs money, and for her, arranging all of the tests delayed her start as a full-time teacher by at least a semester. How absurd.
Required testing beyond a degree protects unions by reducing the new-hire pools. Competition is good, and excessive requirements with little practical value are anti-competitive. Get young people into the classrooms teaching. No test offers the key to successful classroom management, the most vital skill for a teacher to master.
The Left occasionally backs into reasonable solutions. In this case, by looking to reduce barriers to developing a more diverse candidate field, the activists have inadvertently discovered the wonders of an open market not hampered by testing guilds. Having more applicants provides downward pressure on salaries — good for taxpayers — and increases the odds that poor or ideologically driven teaching is shown the door.
More teachers, more!