News

November 14, 2008

State, colleges clash over teacher training

College reps say new guidelines will place burden on education major.

MARTHA RAFFAELE AP Education Writer

HARRISBURG — Officials at some Pennsylvania colleges say their authority to shape curriculum is being undermined by changes the state wants in the way elementary and middle-school teachers are trained.

New guidelines for the state’s 93 schools with teacher-preparation programs will place burdensome credit requirements on education majors and may discourage students from pursuing education degrees, college representatives said at House hearing Thursday.

“As new demands are placed on institutions to better prepare teachers, the response to the demands cannot be to simply add credits to candidates’ programs,” said Kathleen Ruthkosky, president of the Pennsylvania Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

The state Education Department is replacing the current elementary education certificate for teachers of grades K-6 with two new certificates — one for teaching students in grades 4-8, and another for pre-kindergarten through fourth grade.

All education majors will also be required to take courses in special education and teaching students who are learning English, and new special-education teachers will also need to be certified to teach in regular education classrooms.

Liberal-arts colleges worry that by substantially increasing the number of required education courses, the guidelines will weaken their mission of broadly educating students in multiple subjects, said Lex O. McMillan III, president of Albright College in Reading.

For example, the prekindergarten-4 certificate requires students to complete at least 60 credits of education courses, plus student teaching.

McMillan said the result would “narrow not only the educational preparation and experience of students at schools like ours, but also the intellectual preparedness and diversity of the teacher-candidate pool from which the commonwealth draws to staff its classrooms.”

Kathleen Shaw, deputy secretary of the state’s office of postsecondary and higher education, said that while the guidelines are intended to define more clearly what teachers should know and be able to do, they leave specific curriculum decisions up to the schools.

“Our new guidelines do not dictate a standard curriculum or specific courses; instead they provide the flexibility for institutions to determine how they will meet our standards,” Shaw said.

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