Above the fold: Teachers not credentialed in subjects

The Chicago Tribune does have a way of sensationalizing the obvious—or at least of turning non-news into a front page apparent exclusive, as in today’s edition. Lead story: Study shows many teachers not credentialed in their subjects.

The “study” mentioned in the 72-point headline, I have to point out, is a Tribune investigation. I’m not questioning the accuracy of the study, just the “peer-reviewedness” of it.

I know the study’s accurate because a friend of mine, a high school German teacher, about 10 years ago had just received her teaching license in Illinois after getting a master’s degree. She plastered her degree on her résumé, as well as her German credentials.

Three schools called her for an interview. At the first, she was shocked to discover she was being interviewed for a French teaching position. Realize, she didn’t know a word of French. But that’s what the school needed.

I asked her if they had even read her résumé, but it was a rhetorical question. The answer would have been yes in an ideal world, but the answer for the first school on her interview list was clearly no.

The point of my retelling this story a decade later is precisely that it’s a decade later. Now comes the Tribune to say this is some sort of scandal and we should all be worried that our kids aren’t being taught by teachers who are credentialed in the subjects they’re teaching.

In many cases, it’s not as bad as the French-German example from my past. Some, though not all, of the practice can be accounted for by the teacher shortage in certain subjects, which is the most common reason school districts dish out to reporters who think this is news. I’ve never really believed that was the main reason teachers are teaching in subjects for which they aren’t credentialed, but that’s usually the line reporters are handed. The root cause, I tend to think, is that any “teacher shortage” is a result of people not wanting to become teachers anymore, especially in states like Illinois, where private interests have used the media to rob school districts in the city and to expand into the suburbs.

As the Tribune discovered, though, a teacher shortage, whatever the cause, doesn’t really explain the situation entirely. There’s an abundance of teachers who have credentials in subjects for which many teachers who don’t have those credentials are hired. Schools overlooked, the paper reported, a vast pool of newly credentialed teachers (4,511 in 2009, for instance, in English language arts) and hired, for the first time, only a small number from that pool in 2010 (478).

But as usual, the Tribune completely misrepresents the data it obtained, probably because it doesn’t understand how the hiring process works in our schools. This is not some company, where people walk into an HR office and hand over some transcripts and recommendations. Teachers who get brand new credentials, known as endorsements to educators, aren’t usually in the hiring pool. They are usually working teachers who are looking to expand their opportunities. They usually don’t quit their current job to get a new endorsement in a specialty subject.

Besides, even if half of the 4,511 newly credentialed ELA teachers in 2009 were fresh out of college or in the pool of applicants for some other reason, schools that may need more English teachers aren’t always able to hire the other half on a full-time basis. That’s because the new need doesn’t account for five full teaching periods’ worth of students. That also means it’s not in the budget, and the school can’t just hire a full-time teacher because there’s a teacher with a new endorsement. They’re not mountains.

Other issues abound as well with the Tribune’s headline, but they don’t nullify the fact that about 5 percent of high school and middle school teachers are teaching subjects for which they’re not fully endorsed (which means 95 percent of them are fully endorsed). That’s the snapshot here, and the lesson is that, while this isn’t exactly breaking news, it is something that needs to be fixed.

Yes, the teacher credentialing system has been through a tough year and a half, I know. A major security breach was reported last year, releasing personally identifying information about teachers in the system to anyone who looked up a teacher’s name, and a system shutdown and contract non-payment fiasco occurred only 26 hours after the system, known as ELIS, was launched, which prevented several new licenses from being issued. But system problems don’t really affect the education of students.

Putting a teacher who doesn’t have a special ed endorsement in front of a special ed classroom is like putting a German teacher in front of a French III class. It’s not going to work.