“We need more teachers,” Democratic Sen. Jim Beach, who sponsored the bill, said in May 2024 when the chamber cleared the bill in a 34-2 vote. “This is the best way to get them.”…
In 2017, New York also scrapped its basic literacy requirements for teachers, noting it was meant to increase diversity among teachers. However, according to the NEA, only about half of New York students in grades three through eight tested proficient in English and math during the 2022-2023 school year despite the state spending almost twice the national average on education.
California and Arizona also lowered requirements for teacher certification by implementing fast-track options for substitute teachers to become full-time educators and eliminating exam requirements to make up for shortages in the field…
A lot of states have done it. They just can’t find teachers. You can’t discipline the kids, the pay isn’t worth the work. As Steve mentioned Florida did it and so did Georgia and North Dakota. North Dakota surprises me because they have highly educated Citizens. I think Nevada is looking into it. If you do not have to have a degree it makes it much easier to teach.
But we live in a society that has been slowly disparaging teachers. First it was “if you can’t do, you teach”, which is ridiculous, but it has a negative impact. Now it’s “you don’t need a college degree”. The end result? We’re having to import educated people to fill those roles in this country because we don’t produce enough of them. (and those we have demand a better salary than the imports). The JC’s and the Corporations love it. They aren’t taxed to pay for this education, they simply take advantage of other country’s willingness to do so.
Its worth noting we are usually importing our highly educated workers from countries that do value education and pay for it on a societal basis – most of them don’t end up with large amounts of student debt to get that Master’s in Electrical Engineering from their home country…
Perhaps HS but not college. They rank in the 30s (out of the 50 states) for Bachelor’s degrees. Oddly enough, roughly half of the students at their state colleges and universities (as of 2010) come from outside of the state - so perhaps many/most of them also leave once they are done.
This means that 49.4 percent of first-year college students in North Dakota (3,313 students) came from out of state. That gave North Dakota the third largest proportion of out-of-state, first-year students among all states.
As suggested in the “highly skilled,” make or import thread, funding USian education means levying taxes, including on those “burdened” JCs, to pay for it. If the educated people are imported from other countries, they were educated on someone else’s dime. That way, the “JCs” have it both ways: they have the educated workers they want, without paying for their education.
I can see that passing a literacy test could be optional for teachers of some subject matter. For example a foreign language teacher from the country of the language being taught could be much better teacher than someone who passes the (English) test and learned the other language later in life.
And what about shop teachers (do many schools even still have this)? I think we need more of them. More important to know how to not cut off your fingers than some written test, IMO.
I remember the complaint that nurses were underpaid, and it is surely true. Then came the pandemic and hospitals were falling all over themselves to pay them retention bonuses, signing bonuses, and to import traveling nurses for well over $100k a year - while they needed them.
Since I’m writing this I just looked it up. Nurses salaries had the biggest jump in 20 years from 2020 to 2021, and again from 2021 to 2022. Of course I don’t think anyone seriously proposed that we just let “anybody” be a nurse, as they are doing with teachers.
But hey, what could letting a bunch of people who have never taught, never taken any instruction on how to teach, and who (I point out) are currently unemployed (otherwise why look for a low pay job?) - what could possibly be bad about this plan?
Not teaching “undervalued”, but a assault on learning. We have all seen the years long campaign against 'common core", which is a voluntary set of standards for minimal educational attainment. After all, if states defund education, they can give the “JCs” another tax cut.
‘Classical education’ thrives in DeSantis’ Florida https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/04/ron-desantis-classical-education-florida-00195705 Florida has become a haven for classical education…While several states are embracing the education approach — which emphasizes liberal arts and western teachings on math, science, civics and classical texts that have increasingly been embraced by conservatives and some Christians — Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis is going further by turning the state into an incubator for classical schools, both public and private alike.
The efforts are one key way Florida’s GOP governor and policymakers are reshaping education in the state. With a second Trump administration coming, there are expected to be more opportunities for classical education to grow nationally, such as through the 161 schools operated by the Department of Defense.
I saw an article along those lines a day or two back. “Classical” being used in place of “turn the clock back 100 years, to when all the good things in the world were done by straight, white, Christian, men”.
Actually Darwin wrote his book in 1871 so you would have had to go back at least 200 years. Seriously, anyone who slaps classical on a text full of lies might have something there though.