New York charter schools may soon be able to hire and certify their own teachers instead of having to go through the state, according to state regulations announced Wednesday.
The proposed change was published in the State Register and would allow schools to design their own training programs as well as certify their teachers, and comes in response to a trend of charter schools struggling to hire enough teachers to fill their needs. The new rules also reflects a battle between Democrat control of New York state schools and a push to expand charter schools from Republicans.
The new plan, drafted by the State University of New York Charter Schools Institute, would not require New York public schoolteachers to have a master’s degree or to have graduated from an education program. It would, however, stipulate that candidates must have at least 100 hours of “field experience” meaning that they must teach for said hours while being supervised by another teacher.
“Parent demand for public charters continues to rise, and we owe it to our scholars to find a solution to the massive teacher shortage and meet this demand with high quality, well-trained teachers from diverse backgrounds,” said a spokeswoman for Success – a charter school network – Nicole Sizemore, according to Politico earlier in July.
“A need has been demonstrated, and I think all the stakeholders acknowledge that there is a teacher shortage and that it’s going to get worse,” said Joseph Belluck, a board member of the charter committee that will either approve or reject the new rules.
Teachers’ unions and education experts criticize the proposal, saying that candidates can qualify too easily. “We would be skeptical of people who say we should have more flexible pathways into medicine, or into becoming an airplane pilot, these are activities on which other people’s lives depend,” said Columbia University professor. “I think it’s a terrible disservice to children to act as if their teachers don’t have to be prepared,” he added.
“This isn’t good for the teaching profession,” the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, Kate Walsh, told TheNYT. “In the same breath, I would say that if I were a charter school, I’d be trying to do the exact same thing, because the current system is so dysfunctional in many respects,” Walsh added, expounding on the difficulties of addressing and amending the teacher shortage problem in an imperfect system.
The new plan is a direct front to the 2017 teacher certification rules that were released in June.
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