Another Thing Ethan and I Share in Common
So here's something that Ethan and I share in common beyond our job, our love of sports, our educational background, and an infatuation with trendy TV shows:
We both interned at the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence during a college summer.
For those of you who may not be familiar with the organization, the American Board is working to create a program through which mid career professionals and recent college grads can get certified to teach in public schools without having go back to a school of education for one or two years worth of classes. The theory is a good and logical one, and it's typified by this example: if Colin Powell wanted to teach High School Civics, or if renowned physicist Dr. Robert Birgeneau wanted to teach AP Physics in a US public school classroom today, they wouldn't be allowed to. Thanks to the American Board...
If General Powell and Dr. Birgeneau were able to pass a rigorous content exam and professional teaching knowledge exam, they'd be granted entry into the classroom in a handful of states that have adopted the Board's certification process.
Ethan and I were actually two of the first interns hired by ABCTE when it was created after NCLB's passage in 2001, and it's been wonderful to watch the organization grow. They released a study today--albeit a small one--that begins to show how the board's certification exams are correlated with teachers who produce higher learning gains than those teachers who are not able to pass the board's tests. They've also launched a five year comprehensive evaluation study to determine the true impact of their teachers on student learning - and it will be very interesting to see the results over time. Stay tuned to this story - it could mean a lot more people have the ability to enter the teaching profession. The upshot of this could be promising for youth: when employers (in this case, principals) see an increase in qualified applicants for a job, the quality of the employees tends to rise as well.