BustED Pencils’ Jed Hopkins: The danger of uncredentialed teachers
In case you’ve been living under a rock you might not know that my great state of Wisconsin—under the fascist like leadership of pseudo-conservatives—is subverting democracy and using the budget process to ram through oligarchic sponsored legislation. However, the slash and burn approach to anything remotely connected to public education is particularly maddening.
In the post below, my colleague and BustED Pencils co-host—Jed Hopkins—addresses one of the nastier provisions contained in the budget that essentially dismantles the state’s responsibility to “credential” professional teachers.
Consider what the provision in the state budget that would allow individuals without education credentials to teach our children will put into effect. This move, approved by the Joint Finance Committee, is an audacious policy move indeed. But its extremity can only be matched by its foolishness and danger.Why? Investing in education means investing in something that, for the sake of our children and our children’s children, needs to be done as well as possible. Doing education well is not technically simple, is not a quick study, is not something that can be mastered readily, isn’t simply something driven by hard performance data, is not replaceable by online instruction, and is even much more than a matter of enthusiasm, talent and effort.We are talking about education, not training. Education is the very thing that can sustain this great country’s future, and that will depend upon teachers who measure up.And what grounds do we have for claiming this? Look no further than the immense intellectual traditions of educational thinking that this country can rightly be proud of (that barely get the light of day in the common media), traditions of research that challenge us to “think education” and are the envy of less free nations. In this country, we have educators who know how to think education which, unlike the way it is for someBustED Pencils' Jed Hopkins: The danger of uncredentialed teachers | BustED Pencils: