What Will a Teacher's "Bar Exam" Do?
"They only care about themselves." "We put Children First." "Let's worry about the children in the system, and not the adults." "The bad ones spoil it for the good ones."
Actually I have no problem with higher standards for teachers, be they national or local. UFT has been calling for them for years, so that's nothing new. There are few things more infuriating than idiotic calls to lower standards from the likes of Nicholas Kristof, bolstered by absurd claims that current certification rules preclude Meryl Streep and Colin Powell from becoming teachers. Of course, neither has expressed the desire to become a teacher anyway.
The problem is twofold--one, those who design tests nowadays have shown themselves to be hugely incompetent and self-serving, and are unlikely to do any better for teachers than they do for students. More importantly, prejudice is fueled by ignorance, not reality, and is unlikely to be countered by any such thing as a new teacher test, whatever it may be called. There are already tests to qualify teachers, and that hasn't stopped