PushBack » Education

Certified Teachers, Certifiable Credentialling Rules

Peter Sheerin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:46:00 +0000

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.

Mathematically Correct

Peter Sheerin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:14:00 +0000

In browsing through some decade-old newspaper clippings, I came across one that discussed the infamous 1997 decision by the California Academic Standards Commission to turn down an offer by a group of three scientists who had won the Nobel prize in chemistry (and one of whom the Nobel committee described as “one of the most creative research workers of our age”) to write the state’s new science curriculum for free. In trying to find references to this online, I came across an interesting online group–Mathematically Correct, which according to David Gelernter of the NY Post, “fights the Establishment on behalf of sanity and quality in math education.”

The group᾵s details of the 1997 science curriculum war is well worth reading, but you should also read their report on the National Center on Education and the Economy, How the NCEE Redefines K-12 Math, which Mathematically Correct describes as shallow, focuses on the use of calculators, and does not include any Ᾰtasks involving large numbers, negative numbers, prime numbers, operations with fractions, or operations with decimals.Ᾱ

D.C. Schools Cutting in Wrong Place

Peter Sheerin — Wed, 10 Dec 2003 22:46:00 +0000

Today’s edition of CNN.com includes a story on the job cuts in the D.C. public schools. The story leads with the fact that 545 teachers and 226 others will be losing their jobs, but the really interesting details are in the last several paragraphs.

According to the article, the school has 65,099 students, 14,058 total employees (1 non-teaching employee for every 7.52 students), and 5,400 teachers (1 teacher for every 12.06 students). Teachers make up barely a third of the school system’s employees, and the student to teacher ratio is worse than the non-teaching employee ratio to students!

20% of Calif. high-school seniors won’t graduate

Peter Sheerin — Sat, 03 May 2003 20:17:00 +0000

The AP is reporting that A fifth of California’s high school students expected to graduate in 2004 won’t receive their diplomas because they have not taken all the math classes they need in order to pass the mandated tests.

So why are the politicians and administrators and school boards responsible for this mess allowed to remain in power, and cover their asses by delaying the requirement for another three years?