I recently returned from a trip to Colorado to visit with my wife’s very sick sister and in trying to catch up with my emails and various items on the ‘net, I discovered this rather sad commentary on our sick educational system. It highlights the fact that an increasing number of Republican states are decimating the educational system by cutting off funds and trying to make life as difficult as possible for those who try to teach the kids. In this case Kansas is engaged in a series of cut-backs that are sending teachers to other states in an attempt to earn a living.

In the article, which underlines the fact that there are those in this country who would just as soon get rid of public education entirely, there is mention of the fact that Kansas is hiring unlicensed teachers to fill the spaces left by those who are moving out of state to find employment elsewhere. Strange to say, I tend to agree with this move, despite the fact that it smells of using “scabs” to fill the places of striking union workers. In this case, assuming that the replacement teachers are well educated, they might be an improvement over those with certification. In general, I have a rather low opinion of the entire certification process in this country, as some might recall from previous posts. I have seen a number of students leave the education department at my university because they regarded the required courses as “Mickey Mouse,” too easy and what they regarded as a waste of time. It’s a zero-sum game and for every “methods” course that those kids must take they miss out on the chance to take challenging courses that would make them better and wiser teachers. I had a teacher in the education department tell me at one point that one of my honor students was “too smart” to be a secondary school teacher and that she should find another field of study!

In the first year after I graduated from college I taught at a private secondary school in New York where none of the teachers had certification. The reputation of the school was (and still is) stellar and I found the teachers, without exception, to be excellent and dedicated to their task. They were all college graduates with majors in academic fields such as English, History, Biology, Foreign Language, and the like. They knew their stuff and they imparted it to their students with consummate skill — as far as I could see. In fact, none of the private schools in the East — and elsewhere as far as I know — require certification of their teachers. And yet they have well-earned reputations as excellent places to send the young. Indeed, over the years, I have come to the conclusion that the requirement to certify teachers is a bit of a joke and certainly not the guarantee of excellence that it was supposed to be at the outset. And, as we all have discovered, Finland — which has the highest rated school system in the world — does not require that their teachers to be “certified.”

However, while I am sympathetic with the desire to circumvent the certification process, I most assuredly do not have any sympathy for those who would derail the entire public education system that has, until recently, provided this nation with most of its movers and shakers. Perhaps I am biased as I am also a product of the public education system through high school, as were my wife and two sons. There are serious problems in our public education system that have lowered it in comparison with other systems around the world. But the glutting of the schools, the increasing number of attempts to weaken the entire system until it breathes its last, is assuredly not the way to go. I would applaud any effort to eliminate the certification process and the schools of education that pretend that teaching is a science (when we all know it is an art). However, the answer is not to cut funding, but to increase it and attract the best and brightest to the teaching profession. It does appear that legislators like those in Kansas seek to cut off their noses to spite their faces.