A Kappan Special Section on Teacher Education No-Fault Teacher Education

Abstract

Smaller class sizes set off a scramble to hire new teachers in California, putting pressure on teacher training institutions to take steps to meet the demand. Cal State Long Beach teacher educators took a deep breath and said, Count us in, but they refused to give up their focus on quality. authors tell the tale of what happened next. IN JULY of 1996, the California State University (CSU) system appointed a task force consisting of eight CSU presidents to develop a plan to revamp teacher education throughout the system. This Presidents Commission on Teacher Preparation and K-18 Education was charged with making recommendations to improve the quality of teacher education on the 23 CSU campuses. newly formed commission was clearly facing a formidable task when all of a sudden a new dimension was added. Then-Gov. Pete Wilson made a dramatic and unexpected announcement regarding K-12 education in the state. In a bold and widely popular move, the governor proposed immediate reduction in the size of classes in California public schools to a 20-to-1 student/teacher ratio for grades K-3, with the promise that more grades would be included in the reduction plan later. The class-size-reduction initiative was a direct response to declining test scores in the state.1 A growing population of school-age children and the mandated smaller classes fueled a scramble to hire more teachers in California. It was estimated that 30,000 new teachers would be needed in the first year and some 300,000 over the next 10 years. To help meet the demand, desperate school districts granted an unprecedented number of emergency permits to individuals who did not hold standard teaching credentials. Emergency permits allow college graduates in any discipline to teach for up to five years. This approach is designed to allow career- changing college graduates to begin teaching while they complete a teacher preparation program. Los Angeles County alone has had more than 7,000 teachers on emergency permits. Some $1.7 billion was spent to hire additional teachers during the first year of the class-size-reduction program, but there were some unexpected and undesirable consequences. To fill their classrooms, suburban and small-town districts were recruiting teachers from inner- city schools. In addition, many school districts had contractual seniority programs that allowed teachers in upper elementary grades and middle schools to transfer to the more attractive smaller classes in the primary grades - grades for which some were unprepared or underprepared. Colleges of education in the CSU system were under the gun, and expectations were running high for them to increase dramatically the number of qualified teachers in the state. A first charge to the education schools was to help those holding emergency permits to become fully certified, which was no small task given their different levels of preparation. Compounding the problem of the rapidly growing number of teachers on emergency permits was their very high attrition rate. Estimates are that half of the noncertified teachers quit after a single year, and, in some urban areas, the number has been as high as 70%. Nonetheless, the immediate problem for the CSU education programs was to see that all these emergency teachers were properly certified as quickly as possible. major charge to education programs, however, was to produce more college graduates who were fully certified and knew how to teach. Colleges of education found themselves in an almost impossible position. In California, the Ryan Act of 1970 does not allow colleges of education to offer undergraduate degrees in education. Prospective teachers must earn their degrees in other academic areas and then enroll in a teacher education program for a fifth year of study. While this may not be the best way to go about educating teachers, it is the law in California. This is the situation in which colleges of education found themselves. …