ISSUES WITH ALTERNATIVE CERTIFICATION PRGRAMS FOR TEACHERS

Issues with Alternative Certification Programs for Teachers

Issues with Alternative Certification Programs for Teachers

Alternative routes to teacher certification are having a foremost leverage on many facets of the teaching occupation in the United States. More men, more non-whites, more mature, life-experienced, educated individuals are teaching in the nation's K-12 schools as a conclusion of a expansion of alternative routes to teacher certification all through the country.

What formally begun in the early 1980s as modes to ward off projected shortages of teachers, alternative routes to teacher certification have become foremost players in the yield of highly taught teachers.

We at the National Center for Education Information (NCEI) have been polling state bureaus of discovering every year since 1983 contemplating alternatives to the accustomed acknowledged school of discovering program route for authorising teachers. We have not only found out a very fast development of alternative routes at the state degree, but an explode of one-by-one providers of alternate route programs interior each state. In supplement, a affirmation of the wholeheartedly vital characteristics of an alternative teacher certification program has evolved.

In 2005, 47 states, in supplement to the District of Columbia, report 122 alternative routes to teacher certification being directed by 619 providers of one-by-one programs around the country.

Based on details and figures submitted by the states, NCEI approximates that more than 250,000 persons have been allowed through alternative routes to teacher certification programs since the mid-1980s, with most of the development occurrence in the last decade. Approximately 35,000 individuals are going into teaching through alternative teacher certification routes each year.

Preliminary details and figures really being gathered by NCEI from individuals going into teaching through alternate routes to certification brandish the following:

·                     70 per century are older than 30 years of age, 38 per century are male and 30 per century are non-white.

·                     46 per century are teaching in a large city.

·                     Nearly half were engaged in a non-education occupation the year previous to going into an alternative route program.

·"Being proficient to educate while getting certified” and “receiving a teacher's salaries and advantages” were the most important variables in their selecting an alternate path to teaching.

·"Teaching full time as a teacher of record all through the program” far outranked any other variable as the most cooperative constituent of the alternate route program in developing competence to teach.

·                     On signify, 97 per century of those going into teaching through alternate routes state they appear now competent in some facets of teaching.

·                     Nearly half state they would not have become a teacher if the alternate route to certification had not been available. An supplemented 25 per century said they weren't sure.

Full minutia of this study will be handed out in Spring 2005 and will be dispatched on our world very broad world broad web sites at www.ncei.com and www.teach-now.org.

Clearly, alternative routes to teaching are expressing non-traditional populations of individuals into the teaching occupation who yearn to aid juvenile individuals develop and teach where the assertions ...