Introduction

America needs more teachers. Retirements, rising student enrollments, and a drive to reduce class size will create a demand for as many as 2 million new teachers over the next decade. The needs are especially pressing in the distressed schools where teachers least want to teach and in certain subjects such as math and science.

But more is not enough: America also needs better teachers. Empirical evidence of the importance of teacher quality is mounting, and has sparked a dialogue about the quality of the nation's teaching force. In Tennessee, research by William Sanders has quantified the cumulative effects of even one or two bad teachers on a student. He found substantial differences in student achievement based on the sequence in which a student had particular teachers. Similar studies elsewhere have shown the same results. Perversely, the students who need the very best teachers are the ones most likely to be hurt by the shortfall of quality teachers.

There are well-established challenges to attracting higher-caliber teachers. Research shows that academically stronger students tend to shun teaching as a profession. Moreover, the U.S. Department of Education reports that college graduates who became teachers within four years after graduating and then subsequently left the profession were more likely to have scored in the top quartile on the SAT and ACT than those who remained. Finally, even in a slowing economy, math and science majors have lucrative opportunities available to them, further complicating recruitment for high-need subjects.

This dual quality-quantity challenge is focusing increasing attention on how we train and certify teachers. While "certification" or "licensing" varies from state to state and is punctuated by an array of exceptions and loopholes, the current system presumes that public educators should be required to earn a state-issued license through an approved teacher education program by taking a series of courses on both pedagogy and subject matter and doing some practice teaching. While the theory is that this licensing process elevates the profession by requiring aspiring professionals to master well documented and broadly accepted knowledge and skills, the reality is very different. Unlike the cases of law or medicine, where the existence of an accepted canon makes licensure a useful device for ensuring minimal competence and consequently boosting public confidence in members of the profession, educational licensure as currently practiced imposes significant costs without yielding commensurate benefits.

Further, there is no canon. While there is some agreement on what teachers should know, there is no consensus on how to train good teachers or ensure that they have mastered essential skills or knowledge. Debate rages over what the best pedagogical strategies are, and even proponents of the existing system cannot define a clear set of concrete skills that make for a good teacher. Despite the absence of widely accepted pedagogical standards, aspiring teachers are forced to run an academic gauntlet of courses, requirements, and procedures created by accredited training programs that vary dramatically in quality. The prospect of spending substantial time and money on preparation and courses of study that may bear little relation to what it takes to be a good teacher discourages some talented people from entering the profession.

To meet these challenges, we must go beyond our traditional system of teacher education, which is archaic and demonstrably failing to meet our needs. Further, change must be more comprehensive than attempts to offer co-existing "alternative certification" programs that in practice are of mixed quality, reach only a small percentage of aspiring teachers, and fail to address the systemic problems posed by regarding certification as the norm. Contrary to the claims of some critics, the problem is not the existence of schools of education and teacher preparation programs or their particular failings. The real problem lies in state laws that give these schools and programs a monopoly on training and certifying teachers.

The arguments fall into two camps. Some propose abolishing schools of education or doing away with certification altogether. Others believe that adding new barriers to entry or creating advanced "master teacher" certifications will address the quality problem and increase the "rigor" of teacher preparation programs. Neither of these approaches will adequately tackle the problems at hand.

This paper proposes a third way: a "competitive certification" model that breaks the monopoly education schools hold on the supply of teachers with the aim of expanding the pool of potential teachers while also addressing the issue of quality. The goal is to increase the pool of qualified applicants for teaching jobs and at the same time increase the competition among providers of preparation and ongoing professional development for teachers.

Clearly, some sort of screening process for aspiring teachers is essential; parents and the public rightly expect safeguards for those working with youngsters. A competitive certification process begins by establishing a few key criteria for entry to the teaching profession. It brings new urgency to the need to give schools greater freedom to hire and fire teachers. And, it treats teachers like professionals and their schools like professional institutions by allowing them to tailor their professional development to their needs, rather than requiring aspiring teachers to have completed a series of courses of little demonstrable value. Under the competitive model, aspiring teachers can apply for a teaching job if they:

• hold a college degree;
• pass an examination of essential skills and content knowledge that would obviously vary by grade level and academic discipline; and
• pass a criminal background check.

The competitive model assumes that additional preparation and training, particularly on-the-job training, are not only desirable but also essential, as is true in other professions where subtle skills and interpersonal dynamics are essential to effective performance. However, whereas contemporary teacher preparation is characterized by a bureaucratic series of hurdles and a dearth of competition among teacher preparation programs, this paper argues that there should be no prescribed sequence for this work and that competition among providers of such services should be encouraged. Thus, while the current model is monopolistic and removes key incentives for quality and relevance in teacher preparation, the competitive model treats teachers as autonomous professionals able to make their own informed decisions about skills and expertise development. In short, the competitive model would move teacher certification past what is essentially a guild system and toward a meaningful professional model.

Blueprint Keywords: Extra Teachers

Frederick M. Hess is an assistant professor of education and government in the Curry School of Education and the School of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia. For a more complete biography, please see the pdf version of this paper.