Certified Teachers, Certifiable Credentialling Rules

In the same pile of newspaper clippings as the previous post alluded to, I found a letter to the editor (likely the SF Chronicle, but clipped without the date or newspaper header), a teacher named Todd Toepfer from Modesto writes about a colleague who was denied a teaching credential because even though she had been teaching for 7 years, because the teaching university she had attended would not recommend her for one because she did not complete the student teaching prerequisite. Her teaching experience included two years at a Big 10 university, two years at a private high school, and two years at the school where she was denied a teaching credential.

With that experience and a master’s degree in two foreign languages, she was denied an official credential for a technicality, and thrown into the group that the education establishment moans about when they complain about the lack of qualified teachers each time they try to tighten the rules about what it takes to become a teacher.

P.S. If my Googling turned up the same Todd Toepfer who wrote the letter, he is a math and science teacher who received an Award of Excellence through the University of California, San Diego, Outstanding Teacher Recognition Program, and is also a member of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. So don’t think this complaint was from someone unexperienced with teaching.

—by Pete at 5:46 PM {PermaLink}