Two Routes to Certification: What Do Student Teachers Think?

Abstract

Alternate routes to certification have assumed increasing importance for teacher education since A Nation At Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) brought teaching and teacher education under public attack. There are an increasing number of alternate routes to teaching--including state, university and college, and district-based initiatives--as well as programs such as Teach for America (Feistritzer & Chester, 1998). Alternate routes may be linked to the university, but they typically seek to fast-track or circumvent traditional university-based teacher education. Some see alternate routes as a serious threat to university sponsored professional preparation (Roth, 1986). Others maintain that the issue is not over professional preparation per se but over the timing and institutional context for teacher preparation, and about the mix of professional knowledge and skills to be acquired (Stoddart & Floden, 1996, p. 90). Alternate routes are established for a variety of reasons (Feistritzer & Chester, 1998): to provide accessibility to the teaching workforce for nontraditional entrants, attract teachers to underserved geographical areas, recruit teachers for subject areas of perennial shortage such as science and math, attract high potential individuals who might otherwise pursue different careers (Darling-Hammond & Cobb, 1996). In California in particular, they have arisen to lessen the historical shortage of special education and bilingual teachers (Gunderson & Karage, 1992; Institute for Education Reform, 1996; McKibben & Schrup, 1995). In California, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing and teacher education programs at public and private institutions have historically discouraged the use of emergency permit teachers (EPTs) as an entry into teaching. The preferred route has been for preservice students to complete their field experiences, including student teaching, in the classrooms of credentialed teachers. However, beginning in 1996, class-size reduction opened hundreds of classrooms to alternate-route teachers, that is, teachers with little or no professional preparation prior to assuming teaching responsibilities. Districts no longer needed to show special hardship to put EPTs in classrooms (McKibben, 1996). A large percentage of EPTs are walk-ons, possessors of an undergraduate degree who have passed the required basic skills test but lack professional preparation. Some come from private and parochial schools seeking larger salaries and improved benefits; they bring teaching experience, but most are uncredentialed. A small number of people who left teaching years earlier are returning to the field, but their credentials long ago expired. Preservice program students who take emergency permit positions before they complete their professional preparation are a large source of uncredentialed teachers. In the changed climate of teacher hiring in California, preservice programs with the traditional structure of coursework followed by student teaching face the predicament of how to accommodate students who take emergency permit jobs before completing the program. Programs ask, How can student teaching be accomplished when the student is already a classroom teacher? How do traditional notions of student teaching conflict with program students who have skipped student teaching and begun teaching before program completion? What is the role of a university-supervised student teaching semester for program students who are classroom teachers of record, some of them teachers of several semesters' experience by the time they get to the student teaching phase of the program? In this article, we report a 2-year study of a preservice program that, since 1996, has used both emergency permit teaching and traditional student teaching as the culminating field experience in the professional preparation sequence. Our purpose in this study was to investigate the perceptions traditional student teachers (STs) and EPTs hold of their different ways of completing their professional preparation. …