Camille Esch and Patrick Shields, Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning
2002
This short report from California's Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning would be more credible if its source weren't so thick with the ed schools and the NCTAF crowd. Written by Camille Esch and Patrick Shields and based on research by SRI International, it purports to be dismayed that 12 percent of California's 40,000 "uncredentialed" teachers possess advanced degrees. (Of course, it says nothing about the quality of their bachelor's degrees - nor how many of the masters degrees that adorn the resumes of conventionally certified teachers were earned in education.) It shows that these younger, less experienced teachers tend to be concentrated in the state's lower performing schools, a phenomenon that has previously been documented by others (and widely attributed to the statewide push for smaller class sizes, which tends to suck veteran teachers out of tough schools, replacing them with beginners). What's problematic about this study is its subtle deprecating of career changers and other unconventional teachers as unqualified by virtue of their lack of postgraduate degrees and its suggestion - this is what the press has seized on - that people from such backgrounds don't offer much of a solution to the problem of teacher shortages. You can see for yourself at http://www.cftl.org/documents/WhoisTeachingCAChildren.pdf.
