State Superintendent of Public Instruction Linda McCulloch has just blown off yet another national report card giving Montana's education system failing grades, and warning us of serious deficiencies. How many more of these wake-up calls will we slumber through?
By Rep. Roger Koopman
In a just released report, the National Council on Teacher Quality gave Montana "last in the class" scores on virtually every category they measure. NCTQ is a highly respected, nonpartisan organization of education researchers and experts that works closely with the U.S. Department of Education.
According to NCTQ, of their 27 specific goal areas to improve classroom teaching, "Montana completely missed 17 goals, met a small portion of seven, partially met one and fully met only one. While the state performed weakly in all areas, it has the most work to do in Alternate Routes to Certification."
Alternate teacher certification should sound familiar to us. My House Bill 230, establishing alternate pathways to the teaching profession, became the Montana Education Association's number one whipping boy in the last session. The teachers' union opposes merit-based competition and open door policies to employment. They prefer to obstruct as much as possible, entry into the teaching field, enabling them to "protect" poorly performing teachers while demand more from taxpayers.
Our primary goal should be putting the best possible teachers in the front of our public school classrooms. As other states have discovered, there are wonderful professionals available, who have a great flair for teaching, exceptional mastery of a given field, and extensive real life knowledge and experience in the subject being taught. By extending to these people an alternate route to teaching, we can enrich the pool of available educators and raise the standards of our teaching profession.
HB 230 allowed local school districts the flexibility to hire, on a trial basis, educators with outstanding credentials and professional backgrounds who may not have followed traditional pathways to teaching, nor passed through OPI's certification cookie press. After one year, the district could recommend them for a state certificate.
MEA went ballistic, charging that HB 230 was "a slap in the face to every professional teacher in our state." House Democrats joined in the histrionics, calling alternate teacher certification "a race to the bottom" that posed an "extraordinary danger to public education." Meanwhile, OPI insisted that Montana already has alternate teacher certification, making my bill unnecessary.
What does NCTQ say about Montana's alleged program? In their report, they referred to Montana's alternate route as "disingenuous" and said we failed all nine tests that determine if a state's alternate routes are genuine.
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NCTQ recommended that Montana "approve a genuine alternate route, one that recruits talented individuals of diverse backgrounds. The route should allow candidates to earn full certification within two years, and school districts and other nonprofits should be able to operate their own programs. The state should treat this route as a legitimate source of talented individuals, not as a substandard route to be used only as a last resort."
NCTQ, by the way, sent repeated requests for OPI to review and react to their analysis, but Superintendent McCulloch never responded.
Open faculty recruiting is hardly a radical idea. Colleges and universities - including in Montana-have done this successfully for decades. No one believes that a teacher is qualified simply because they are certified. (Indeed, a growing body of research reveals almost no correlation between certification and teacher effectiveness.) Nor do we believe that a person is unqualified to teach, merely because they lack a traditionally earned state certificate.
We owe it to our public school students to give them the very best classroom experience. For too long, special interest politics has been a huge impediment to that goal. At present, no state in the nation is more regressive or more hostile to education reform than Montana. No state cowers more to the teachers' union and the education establishment, and works harder at protecting "the system" from accountability and competition. Charter schools? Dead. School choice proposals? Dead. Alternate certification? Dead. We are the killings fields of education reform.
Meanwhile, the chorus keeps singing, "give us more money and leave us alone." State and local taxpayers have dutifully complied, with major funding increases, even in the face of a 12 percent decline in statewide school enrollment. Even while our SAT exam scores have dropped by 22 points since 1995, as compared to a national increase of 18 points.
Perhaps it's time to expect a little reform in return for all those education dollars we spend, and a little more trust in freedom, flexibility and local control - concepts which up until now, have received little more than lip service in our state.
MEA's campaign reached a crescendo on the day my bill hit the House floor. Union members packed the gallery, and proceeded to applaud and jeer on cue - disruptions strictly forbidden by House rules. After three unheeded admonishments, Chairman Himmelberger had enough of their disrespectful behavior, and ordered that the gallery be cleared. Unfortunately, their bullying tactic had already served its purpose. Twenty-seven intimidated Republicans joined a solid block of Democrats in defeating my bill.
Representative Koopman (R-Bozeman) KOOPMAN@IMT.NET is Vice Chairman of House Education Committee.
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