Of course
this is completely absurd. While exams are very good at determining whether one
remembers a bunch of arcane regulations, rules and laws, teachers do not need
to know this kind of stuff. On the other hand, teachers already have to pass relatively
challenging comprehensive high stakes exams in most states to demonstrate their
content knowledge. More importantly, the things that matter most in education
(e.g., ability to build a positive rapport with students, design and implement
creative and engaging lesson plans, create a safe and supportive learning
environment) are difficult or impossible to assess by means of a pen and paper
exam.
According to
Good Education, American Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingharten,
recently suggested that implementing a “bar exam” for prospective teachers
might improve the quality and status of American teachers. To her credit, when
challenged on her proposal, Weingarten clarified that she meant more than a
multiple choice exam and suggested some sort of “clinical” test, which
presumably could include observations of student and or probationary teachers.
While such
an exam could conceivably be designed and implemented in such a way that
prospective teachers were objectively assessed for their skill in front of
students, the likelihood of this occurring is very slim in the current climate
of punitive education reform and general defunding of public education. There
just simply isn’t the money to train and hire sufficient objective 3rd-party
evaluators to make these classroom observations.
Leaving it
to site administrators is certainly possible—it would merely be an extension of
their existing evaluation responsibilities. The problem here is that most
administrators already lack the time and training to do this well and, as the
executives of their respective schools, they have an inherent bias that could
undermine prospective teachers’ chances of earning their credentials or compels
some to substitute what they think their administrators want for good teaching
methods.
Perhaps most
significant in this debate is not the way such an exam would be designed or
implemented, but the presumption that making it harder to become a teacher will
somehow get the Ed Deformers to back off and take us more seriously.
The attacks
on teachers have virtually no basis in any factual or real deficit in the
profession. Rather, they are exaggerations and fabrications designed to muster
public support for preconceived profit-making schemes. For example, “tenure and
seniority protect bad teachers,” is a popularly-believed but inaccurate statement
designed to rally support for abolishing tenure and seniority, which itself is
intended to weaken union protections and the unions themselves. Weakening or
destroying the teachers unions indirectly weakens the union movement as the
public sector is one of the few remaining sectors of the economy that still has
many unionized workers.
Making it
tougher to become a teacher will not change this. The corporate education
profiteers will continue to find new ways to make a buck off of public
education and they will continue to see the teachers and their unions as the
biggest obstacle, using whatever propaganda necessary to achieve their aims.
This will almost certainly continue to include the denigration of teachers and
the profession.
