The public is becoming skeptical about school reform. They are asking, "How can we take seriously all this talk about high standards, new curriculums and revolutionary ways of organizing the school day when there is violence and destruction in the schools?" And I think they are right. No reform is going to work when classrooms are chaotic and when kids who continually disrupt the learning of others cannot be removed.
Well, I'd like to say the same thing about teachers' knowing the subject matter they are supposed to teach. The new curriculums that school reformers talk about won't be worth the paper they are written on unless new teachers are prepared to teach them. If we are serious about reform, we should consider pre-employment tests for prospective teachers that are demanding enough to show who knows the material and who doesn't. Such tests are a practical and relatively inexpensive way to find out who is unqualified to teach the new curriculums -- or the current curriculums, for that matter.
Why don't we already have tests like these in every jurisdiction in the country?
Some people look on pre-employment testing of teachers as unfair -- a kind of double jeopardy. "Teachers are already college graduates," they say. "Why should they be tested?" That's easy. Lawyers are college graduates and graduates of professional school, too, but they have to take a bar exam. And a number of other professions ask prospective members to prove that they know their stuff by taking and passing examinations: accountants, actuaries, doctors, architects. There is no reason why teachers shouldn't be required to do this, too. Indeed, if they were, the public would undoubtedly have greater respect for teachers' qualifications.
Others argue that no paper-and-pencil test can tell you who will be a good teacher, so why bother. It's true that this kind of test won't show who can put across the material and who cannot, but few beginning teachers are experts at presenting a lesson. Assessments requiring that and other performance skills should be postponed until the end of the probationary period when they should be a condition for attaining tenure. However, a paper-and-pencil test will tell you which applicant for a job teaching English can't spell or punctuate or write a decent paragraph (or even a decent sentence) and which person who hopes to teach American history doesn't know what's in the Bill of Rights. No matter what other qualities prospective teachers have, they won't do a decent job without a good grasp of the subject matter they propose to teach.
Some states already have pre-certification tests. But do these tests really find out if prospective teachers know their subject? Or are they more like a minimum-competency exam -- the kind of test that allows youngsters who are at a seventh or eighth-grade level to graduate from high school? And would any of the states that have these tests dare to submit them to an independent evaluation and then reveal to the public the level of knowledge prospective teachers need to pass their test?
Why aren't more states taking this commonsense step? Maybe it's because they are afraid that serious tests would lead to massive teacher shortages.
A few years ago, this would have been much less of a problem. In those days, minorities and women seldom became doctors or lawyers or engineers or business executives -- these professions simply were not open to them. So we had less trouble attracting highly qualified people to the teaching profession, and many of them are still on the job. But now, race and ethnicity and sex are no longer the same kind of bar to good jobs in business or the professions. So given the conditions teachers work under, the salaries they receive and the lack of dignity that often goes with the job, few top graduates are likely to consider teaching.
If states instituted serious pre-employment tests for new teachers, they would undoubtedly face some tough challenges. They might experience a massive shortage of teachers or they might be forced to explain why they hired teachers who were not prepared to teach. Or they might have to do what employers in the private sector do: figure out a series of incentives in terms of salary and working conditions that would make teaching competitive enough to attract more of those who meet the standards. If we expect school reform to go anywhere, there's no question what the response has to be.