North Carolina gives new teachers an out:
Legislators and North Carolina state education leaders reached an agreement Monday over how to ease teacher licensing rules and allow local schools to hire more out-of-state candidates. A 26-member panel of lawmakers, teachers and administrators agreed to recommend making it easier for teachers with less than three years of experience to receive permanent licenses as long as they earn positive evaluations from supervisors.
How did they make it easier? By changing one thing -
The final step for a state license has been requiring a teacher to pass a standardized test or complete a standardized evaluation program. Monday's recommendation would create a third option: a positive evaluation from a supervisor that reflects the teacher's ability to "impact student learning" and that the school district has offered to continue employing the teacher.
Despite all the hooha about how this "expands the options" of school districts and "emphasizes a standard" for new teachers, all they've done here is make it possible for a teacher to be offered a permanent position even if they can't pass the Praxis II and specialty exams, and satisfy all the administrators who need to fill teaching slots and aren't worried that these new folks can't pass these tests.
Posted by kswygert at November 29, 2005 12:50 PM