Kathryn Joyce: Arizona Eliminates Standards for Teachers

Kathryn Joyce is an investigative reporter for Salon. In this post, she reveals how the Republican leaders of Arizona have decided to conclusion the teacher scarcity by decreasing specifications for lecturers. They have determined that educating is not a profession. Anybody, they imagine, can do it.

She writes:

Very last week, just days immediately after the Arizona legislature handed the most expansive school voucher law everywhere in the country, Gov. Doug Ducey signed into legislation another education evaluate decreeing that general public college lecturers are no lengthier required to have a higher education degree of any type prior to currently being hired. Instead of demanding a masters degree — which has long been the norm in the occupation — Arizona teachers will only have to be enrolled in college in buy to begin training the state’s general public school learners.

The law, SB 1159, was pushed by conservatives on the grounds that Arizona has confronted a extreme teacher shortage for the last six decades, which, by this wintertime, remaining 26% of teacher vacancies unfilled and almost 2,000 lecture rooms without having an official trainer of record. That lack has led supporters of the monthly bill, which includes enterprise pursuits this kind of as the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, to declare that loosening teacher credential prerequisites will help fill all those staffing gaps. Opponents of the monthly bill, having said that, place to the simple fact that Arizona has the least expensive teacher salaries in the place, even even though boasting a spending budget surplus of additional than $5 billion.

“Arizona’s teacher scarcity is outside of crisis degrees,” tweeted Democratic point out Rep. Kelli Butler this March. “Instead of presenting serious methods (like rising pay back & cutting down class sizes) the House Education Committee handed a bill to reduce the requirements to teach.”

“With Arizona striving to get instruction monies to parents directly to fork out for education — including homeschooling — you see more evidence that the condition doesn’t treatment who teaches its kids,” stated David Berliner, an training psychologist at Arizona Condition University and former president of the American Educational Study Affiliation. “Charters and private schools for yrs have not desired licensed individuals running faculties or educating youngsters — as prolonged as the voucher for the young ones displays up.” Merged with its new law generating a common voucher program, Berliner additional, “Arizona may well now be the most radical point out in phrases of instruction coverage.”

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Arizona does not care about its kids.