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February 2, 2011

Teacher Licensure in Wisconsin - Who is Protected: The Parents or the Education Establishment?

Mark Schug & Scott Niederjohn:

It has been 10 years since Wisconsin overhauled an old set of rules for state teacher licensure (PI 3 and PI 4) and replaced it with a new set called PI 34. At the time of its approval in 2000, PI 34 was warmly welcomed by state leaders and legislators from both sides of the aisle. It was praised as a way to create a new generation of Wisconsin teachers.

The purpose of this report is to assess PI 34 in an effort to learn whether it has made good on these high expectations.

The underlying issue in this assessment has to do with occupational licensure. Why is it widespread in many states including Wisconsin? There are two viewpoints. The first is that consumers don't have enough information to make judgments regarding the purchase of services from members of certain occupations. Licensure, according to this view, serves as a means to protect consumers from fraud and malpractice.
The second argument is made by economists. It opposes the first. Prominent economists claim that licensure benefits members of various occupations more than it benefits consumers. It does so by limiting access to the occupations in question, thus reducing competition. Those seeking protection from barriers of this sort believe that the various regulations will eventually enhance their incomes. The costs to consumers include reduced competition and restricted consumer choice.

...

PI 34's weaknesses far outweigh its strengths. The weaknesses include the following:

  • PI 34 undervalues the importance of subject-matter knowledge in initial training programs for teachers and in teachers' professional development activity.
  • PI 34 imposes an overwhelming regulatory system--dwarfing, for example, the regulatory system governing licensure for medical doctors.
  • PI 34 rules for licensure renewal fail to ensure that renewal will depend on demonstrated competence and professional growth. These rules create incentives for pro forma compliance, cronyism, and fraud.
  • PI 34 sets up high barriers (a single, proprietary avenue) for entrance into teaching. It makes licensure conditional on completion of approved training programs requiring, normally, at least two years of full-time enrollment in education coursework. Many highly trained professionals contemplating career changes are deterred by these requirements from becoming teachers, despite demand for their services.
  • PI 34 has no built-in measures for linking teacher licensure to teacher competence. Wisconsin has no evidence that any incompetent teacher has ever been denied licensure renewal.
  • PI 34 enables education producers (WEAC and the DPI) to dominate the licensure system. In this system, parents and students are marginalized.
  • PI 34 is particularly onerous for educators in large urban districts like Milwaukee, where producing academic gains is a challenging problem, and school principals, struggling to hire competent teachers, would benefit greatly from a flexible licensure system.
Related: An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at February 2, 2011 5:20 AM
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Comments

I have not had a chance to read this entire document (the whole report is pretty long), but it certainly seems to hold back nothing. WI teachers (or wanna-be teachers) are told that we have one of the strongest licensing systems in the country. But national reports comparing the effectiveness of the system in educating K-12 students give WI a "D" grade on the A-F scale. Ouch.

I am licensed myself, in special education. I had to essentially start over my undergraduate education (in spite of having a BA, an MA, and a PhD abd, in a highly scientific field), because I did not have the intro classes required of all teachers in WI, like the History of Education in Wisconsin, and an Overview of US Education. It was not content areas I had to renew my "knowledge" in, but pedagogy (how to teach), and 90% of it was very theoretical. I mean, even the "field teaching" was theoretical: we had no incentive to do more than required in pre-teaching hours, and were often specifically disallowed the chance to work with students individually or in small groups, much less to "teach" a whole class. Each class you took, you had to be careful to parrot back the views and procedures favored by that professor, or you would be guaranteed a poor grade, and therefore, risk being told that you would "not make a good teacher", because you "didn't even get good enough grades yourself".

I am teaching now, but in a private setting, for one-on-one instruction in reading and other subjects for students of all ages with learning disabilities. Even having gone through the full gamut of "special ed" prep courses, I have learned more about real effectiveness in teaching people with learning disabilities in the last two years here, than I had in my entire schooling period for licensure. All the chatter about "best practices", and other newest-and-greatest-improvements-in-how-to-teach, distracted hugely from whether or not you yourself actually understood the material you were to teach. People are teaching our children math, for example, in 4th through 8th grades, who really don't have an underlying understanding themselves of such essentials as fractions, decimals, real-life applications, or the vocabulary of mathematics.

I agree wholeheartedly that the preparation of special education teachers has an especially obvious dearth of checks and balances that you actually know the content areas to be taught to your students. It is all about approaches to motivation, behavior monitoring systems, and test-taking strategies for kids with disabilities. There is little-to-nothing in place to ensure you understand math, for example, before you are to teach it to middle school or high school students with fundamental learning differences.

Posted by: Nameless Teacher at February 9, 2011 3:46 PM
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