Putting the Fox In Charge of the Henhouse

Would you have the alcoholic guard the liquor cabinet?

Would you have the kleptomaniac guard the jewelry store?

Would you put the inmate in charge of the asylum?

For our liberal friends out there:  would you want industry writing OSHA health and safety regulations?  Would you want industry writing EPA pollution standards?

Would you want the teachers' union to decide who gets to be teachers?

A major teachers union wants to create a rigorous professional exam for K-12 teachers that would serve the same function as the bar exam for lawyers and board certification for doctors.

“Unlike law, medicine, architecture and engineering, we hand teachers the keys and tell them to go into the classroom and do their thing,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who is expected to announce the plan Monday. “This is about raising the standards of our profession and making sure that kids get teachers who are prepared.”

A task force of teachers and education experts Weingarten assembled spent a year developing recommendations to improve teacher preparation and certification.

Under the AFT plan, prospective teachers who have undergone training at an education school would have to demonstrate knowledge of their subject areas, an understanding of the social and emotional elements of learning, and spend a year in “clinical practice” as a student teacher before passing a rigorous exam.

All of that sounds reasonable, but why would you expect something so noble from a union?  Answer:  you shouldn't.  Ole Randi and the gang have quite the ulterior motive:

At the same time, alternative teacher preparation programs have sprouted up, offering a streamlined path to certification and the classroom. Teach for America, for example, gives college graduates five weeks of training before sending them into some of the most troubled schools in the country.

A bar exam would “just level the playing field,” Weingarten said. “Maybe all the alternative certified teachers will pass with flying colors. But if only 10 percent of TFA passed it and 90 percent of the students from Teachers College passed it, that would say something.”

My guess is that the TFA candidates would, in their summer "boot camp" have received more practical knowledge and less political indoctrination than the typical teacher candidate, but that's just a guess.

With her last comment quoted above, Randi's shown her true colors.  She's not as interested in improving the teaching corps as she is in deciding who gets to be a part of that teaching corps.

Her suggestion isn't altruistic, it's entirely self-serving--painfully, transparently so.