Things+of+Interest

=Overhaul of state teacher licensing advocated=

Wisconsin Policy Research Institute report finds system overly bureaucratic
By Amy Hetzner of the Journal Sentinel Feb. 1, 2011 | [|(36) Comments] Wisconsin's method of licensing public school teachers is too rigid when it comes to who is initially allowed into classrooms and too lax on who is permitted to stay, according to a new report. The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute calls for an overhaul of the state's decade-old licensing rules, instead giving control to local officials with a system that places more emphasis on teachers' subject-matter knowledge and effectiveness. The state also shouldexplore removing licensure requirements altogether for charter schools, which are publicly funded schools that operate independently with more freedom from state laws, the report by the Thiensville-based institute recommends. "I think parents and principals should have much more authority about who's in the classroom and who isn't," said Mark Schug, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who wrote the report with Lakeland College economics professor M. Scott Niederjohn. Christina Brey, spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state's largest teachers union, said the report failed to clearly outline how it would replace the current licensing system. She also derided the report's recommendation that local school districts or counties be allowed to make decisions about licensing teachers. "That worked back when we had a horse-and-buggy society," she said. "Should we go back to the time when we needed only a high school diploma to teach? That doesn't move our state forward."
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A tangle of rules
The state's licensure rules, approved in 2000 and first applied to graduates from the class of 2005, require prospective teachers to pass basic knowledge and skills tests, graduate from state-approved preparation programs and receive mentors for their first year in the profession. The rules also require teachers seeking license renewal to demonstrate that they have developed enough professionally to remain in their careers. The result is a system that is so overly bureaucratic - requiring the enforcement of 884 code points for preparation programs across the state - that it is virtually impossible to oversee, Schug contends. Because of this, aspects of the licensing regime are left to individual teachers seeking licensure and relicensing, opening the process up to the possibility of fraud. School principals told institute researchers that they knew of teachers who gamed the system by giving gift cards of $50 to $75 to other teachers to write their professional development plans for license renewal and paying off review committee members to sign off on those plans, according to the report. "I would be shocked if the people at the (Department of Public Instruction) had not heard this," Schug said. "I mean, we convened this little group of principals and that's the first thing that came out in the interview. . . .  Everybody had a story." In response to an e-mail seeking comment, DPI spokesman Patrick Gasper wrote that the agency had not received any complaints of teachers who paid off their reviewers. "Obviously we would be interested in learning the details of those allegations in order to conduct some follow-up," he wrote. Brey also said that she had not heard of any such cases.

DPI official defends system
Gasper declined to comment on the report, which he said department officials had not had a chance to thoroughly review. But he defended the current licensure system, saying that it melds competency requirements in subject-area knowledge and pedagogy while also offering increased flexibility for licensed teachers to gain licensure in new areas by passing content tests. "We continue to work within (the licensing rules) to establish necessary flexibility to keep pace with the needs of Wisconsin school districts while maintaining teacher quality," Gasper wrote. The report concedes that the state's current licensure program is better than the one it replaced. The previous system was even more prescriptive, with no focus on results and no requirements that teachers pass tests in the subjects that they teach, according to the report. But the current system doesn't go far enough to help promising candidates become teachers, the think tank contends. As an example, the report's authors point out that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton University economics professor, would not be able to teach a high school economics course in Wisconsin without passing a content exam, enrolling full-time for two years in social studies education courses and completing 18 credits of student teaching. "The fact is that we've got a disgraceful system of teacher licensure," Schug said. Julia D'Amato, principal of Ronald Reagan College Preparatory High School in Milwaukee, agreed with WPRI's recommendations to tie teacher licensure more closely with teachers' knowledge of the subjects they teach and their students' academic achievement. She also agreed that the renewal process needs more oversight, but she was unsure whether it could be any better managed at the local level than by the state. "The system is flawed," said D'Amato, who was interviewed by the researchers for the report. "There's too many ways that people can - I'm not going to say fake it - but not follow through on what they need to do."