The Two Million Minutes Blog

Indiana Education Superintendent Proposes Radical Change to Teacher Qualifications

INDIANAPOLIS - July 29, 2009 Dept of Education Press Release

"All new teachers will be content experts in the subjects they teach if new licensing rules announced today by Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Tony Bennett are adopted.
                                                                                 “Research shows teachers are the primary factor influencing student achievement,” Bennett said.  “Our goal is to ensure educators are highly knowledgeable in the content areas they’re teaching.
 
“These licensing recommendations will put the focus on teachers’ content knowledge and instructional skill while giving teachers and administrators greater flexibility and freedom to improve instructional quality.”
 
To guarantee the highest teacher quality, the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) is proposing the following changes:

Increase content-area requirements for teacher licensure. Secondary education teachers (grades 5-12) will be required to receive a baccalaureate degree with a major in the content area they wish to teach and a minor in education."

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Having traveled the globe and seen first-hand that the schools with the highest levels of academic achievement ALWAYS have teachers with Masters degree in their subject area, I view Dr. Bennett's step as a major move toward 21st century education in Indiana.

 

DC Voucher Denouement - Teacher's Union Demonstates Raw Power

Full Disclosure:  I was a life long Republican, but I supported President Obama financially to the legal limit, raised money from others to support him and met with him twice during his campaign on the issue of raising American education (curriculum standards, teacher credentialing and achievement expectations) to the global standard.

President Obama is the smartest president since FDR, perhaps smarter in raw intellect. He clearly recognizes that America's K-12 children are desperately behind all but 6 of the 30 developed countries.

So, it was astonishing that a man this brilliant would make his first action in "improving American education" to revoke vouchers from 1,716 low income DC children who had been given the chance for a better education and the hope of escaping grinding poverty.

These vouchers cost the taxpayers $7,500 each - half the cost of the horrendous education in DC's public schools.

With so many other dire stories crowding the news - the collapse and bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler, the $30 billion shift of auto industry pension obligations to the taxpayer, the nationalization of large sectors of the economy and the pending government takeover of 18% of the US economy (nationalized health care)-- I wondered what ever happened to helping low income DC kids get a quality education to lift them out of poverty.

The short answer is - it is impossible to find out. The President, the Secretary of Education, Senator Dick Durbin, Nancy Pelosi, Democrats on the Hill and the enormously rich and powerful Teacher's Unions all seek to obfuscate and dodge the answer.

As best I can tell, the 1,716 kids will not be forced back into to the academically horrendous and obscenely expensive (at $15,000 per student) DC public schools, but no more poor children - primarily Black and Hispanic - will ever again have the Audacity to Hope for escape. They will be condemned by our first African American President to endure lives of poverty. God Bless you, President Obama.

How did President Obama make such a tragic decision? Here's your answer:

Bill Gates: It surprises me that more parents are not upset about the education their own kids are receiving.

From Bill Gates' First Annual Letter from the Gates Foundation:

"The private high school I attended, Lakeside in Seattle, made a huge difference in my life. The teachers fueled my interests and encouraged me to read and learn as much as I could. Without those teachers I never would have gotten on the path of getting deeply engaged in math and software.

How many kids don’t get the same chance to achieve their full potential? The number is very large. Every year, 1 million kids drop out of high school. Only 71 percent of kids graduate from high school within four years, and for minorities the numbers are even worse—58 percent for Hispanics and 55 percent for African Americans.

It surprises me that more parents are not upset about the education their own kids are receiving.

Nine years ago, the foundation decided to invest in helping to create better high schools, and we have made over $2 billion in grants. The goal was to give schools extra money for a period of time to make changes in the way they were organized (including reducing their size), in how the teachers worked, and in the curriculum. The hope was that after a few years they would operate at the same cost per student as before, but they would have become much more effective.

Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way. These tended to be the schools that did not take radical steps to change the culture, such as allowing the principal to pick the team of teachers or change the curriculum. We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school.

Even so, many schools had higher attendance and graduation rates than their peers. While we were pleased with these improvements, we are trying to raise college-ready graduation rates, and in most cases, we fell short.

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