SENATE BILL: The Let Us Have More Teachers Act (Law'd)

[DemPGH]

I'm not sure if this is aimed at the issue or not, but it should be fairly easy for people with bachelors degrees and higher in content fields to get certified to be teachers (because well, that's who should be teaching). I mean, the law needs to recognize them as equal to people who go through a standard certification and Education program. If this does that, I'm all for it.

Frankly, I think if you have a masters degree in a content field, you should be able to just apply for certification in the field and get it. If you want to be certified in something else, then take the test. How it's set up IRL is you take a basic test and then a content test of whatever it is you will be teaching.

FTR, I support a basic test to demonstrate proficiency or knowledge, but I don't think we should go overboard on standardized tests.

[DemPGH]

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X DemPGH, President

If we're going to insist on this sort of thing (I would love to completely re-invent teacher training from the floor up to make it more like the university way), this is pretty good for at least the time being. I support more of a hard score or raw score than saying that the bottom 25% automatically fail. When you have a pass / fail system based on a bottom percentile failing, you could take the test one time and make the cut and the next time not make the cut. I prefer a pass / fail where the bar doesn't move. we can talk about where the bar should be, though.

[DemPGH]

You can't design a test to admit a certain percentage of takers. But even if you could, 75% seems awfully arbitrary. The way this would work is you list all the scores of the test takers and then convert them to a percentile. The highest score or scores would be the 99th percentile and on down. The lowest 25% would be deemed to have failed. So, you could get the same score twice, fail once, and pass the second time. I don't think that's particularly fair. It's simpler and fairer to debate and select a raw score cut-off, and call that the passing score. Just my view of it.