A sensible move on teacher licensing
Over on Jones Street, legislators are reforming teacher licensure so that the process and end-product play a less important role in staffing our schools. Of course, the educrats — the government school employees burrowed indefinitely into our state’s budgets — are (figuratively) having a baby over even mere discussion of this idea. One of them — some guy named Charles Coble – threw a tantrum recently on the op-ed page of The Charlotte Observer:
What if the so-called Public School Operational Relief bill introduced by Republican members of the North Carolina House had instead been a Medical Treatment Relief Bill that required only 50% of our doctors and nurses to be licensed to practice? Would we feel assured that our health care would be improved? The Public School Operational Relief bill would allow 50%, rather than 100%, of our public school teachers to be licensed. [..]
First, this is so dishonest it’s downright shameful. Comparing heart surgery or cancer treatment to teaching algebra or gym? *SERIOUSLY?*
Right now, the marxists who own the public school apparatus — right down to the so called Schools of Education on our state university campuses — have cornered the market. A so-called education degree is four years of marxist brainwashing. It doesn’t make degree holders an expert in anything other than how to pass along Marx’s gospel to a new generation of skulls-full-of-mush.
When I was in school, I had teachers who were actual degreed experts in the subjects they taught — whether it was French or Chemistry or Biology or Calculus. People like that would be a rare find in today’s public education world.
The licensing process is a job protection scam benefiting the state teachers’ union and their allies. I had a friend who retired early from one of the world’s leading financial firms. He was a big, upstairs, corner-office kinda guy at said firm.
My friend had ambitions of teaching math to kids in the public schools where he retired. Never mind his exemplary academic credentials and his career accomplishments. He was told he had to pay his own way through roughly 40 credit hours of seminars on *student discipline* before he could even be considered for a teaching role.
My friend investigated and determined the 40 hours was what he thought — a bunch of leftist hogwash. The golf course was looking better and better. (He did land some adjunct work at a nearby community college, though.)
Interestingly, though. Teaching 12th graders requires licensing and all of this seemingly-never-ending mandated *continuing education* you have to pay for. Yet, teaching those same kids one year later (or the same year) at the local community college does not require that stuff. Why is that?
Are Coble and his comrades suggesting that a community college education is not high-quality because the college faculty have not been subjected to the shake-down and brainwashing their K-12 colleagues have?
Licensing screws up school staffing in other ways. Our state public Ed bureaucracy is just awful about getting teacher licenses transferred in from other states. Experienced teachers move here from other states and are stuck in probationary purgatory while the bureaucracies play pass-the-paperwork.
There are way too many roadblocks out there keeping some talented people from helping and inspiring our kids. Our legislators have a chance here to get a good start on making things right.
