The Office of the Legislative Auditor's recent report on teacher licensure in Minnesota was eye-opening. I have lived within this system for 10 years at the University of Minnesota. I have never seen the teacher licensure system so well-inventoried and described as what I read in this 100-page report.
Before reading the report, I understood that the responsibilities for licensing teachers were shared by the Board of Teaching and the Department of Education, under the guidance of state law. With this understanding, I had many moments of frustration reading in the pages of this newspaper criticisms and legal presses against the Board of Teaching. It was heartening to read in the legislative auditor's report that the allegations brought against the Board of Teaching were considered unjust (p. 93).
While the report carefully examines the administrative processes for awarding teaching licenses, it left unexamined the assumptions in our licensing system around the testing requirements for teachers and the categories of licensure programs we have created — two areas to which the Legislature has given particular attention in the last five years.
All licensed teachers in Minnesota are currently required to have a bachelor's degree (p. 47). In addition, state law still requires that we administer tests of basic academic skills in reading, writing and mathematics. But if anyone receives a bachelor's degree without these fundamental skills, we should be deeply concerned about our system of higher education. Requiring such exams is redundant, costly to candidates (each of these tests requires a fee) and, based on several research studies, does not predict whether someone will be a good teacher.
We seem to hold on to "basic skills" testing requirements out of a common-sense notion that teachers ought to be tested. The assessments that matter for teaching performance are for teaching skills and competence in the subject matter to be taught. Additional testing only creates hurdles and barriers for those who want to be teachers.
The legislative auditor's report makes bold recommendations for a tiered licensure system. Within this scheme, we would be able to rid ourselves of the multiple and varied types of waivers, restrictions and limited-term license categories. However, the report does not critically examine the categorical scheme that the state holds for classifying different types of licensure programs.
We have conventional, nonconventional and alternative programs, according to the Board of Teaching. In reality, we have a wide variety of teacher licensing programs operating in Minnesota: undergraduate, graduate, school district partnerships, targeted recruitment and programs for working teachers seeking to add licenses to their qualifications. For decades, we have had alternatives for people who want to pursue a teaching license after they finish their first college degree. In fact, Minnesota has 869 distinct teacher licensure programs, according to the legislative auditor's report (p. 8). The Legislature was persuaded to create a special classification of "alternative" programming to fit one particular program model — the one used by Teach for America — and today, that is the only program that is categorized as "alternative" in Minnesota.
Categories like "conventional" and "nonconventional" are constructions of the Board of Teaching that allow it to manage its program approval processes. The problem is how we use these categories to communicate with the public and, more importantly, with prospective teachers about the options they have in Minnesota.
