O.C. Leaders Warn Against Overreacting

While admitting to some problems, Orange County educators cautioned against overreacting to a national report released Thursday that found one in four teachers in public schools are under-qualified.

In California, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future reported that 13% of newly hired teachers were unlicensed and 51% were teaching out of their fields. The 26-member commission was chaired by North Carolina Gov. James B. Hunt and included top corporate chiefs as well as the heads of the country’s two largest teachers unions.

Local educators admitted the recent scramble to reduce class sizes to 20 in primary grades has forced some districts to hire teachers that aren’t fully trained.

Numbers of emergency credentialed teachers in Orange County were not immediately available Thursday. But all newly hired teachers are required to have a college degree and must enroll in the appropriate courses to obtain credentials, county schools Supt. John F. Dean said.

“The numbers of fully credentialed teachers isn’t as good as we would hope, of course,” Dean said. “But it isn’t quite as bleak as it may appear.”

Like school districts across California, Orange County schools are urgently seeking more teachers following Gov. Pete Wilson’s plan to cut class size in the primary grades to 20. Orange County alone needs 1,000, although all of the state’s colleges and universities together turn out only 5,000 new teachers a year.

In many districts like Garden Grove and Santa Ana, where the demand for bilingual and special-education teachers is extremely high, teachers are being hired with temporary credentials.

But local experts said it’s dangerous to make harsh judgments about teachers without credentials.

“These teachers aren’t being picked off the highways and by-ways,” said Chapman University Professor Barbara Tye, who studies public school trends. “These are people in training programs, and they want to become teachers.

“To say that many people are teaching something that they aren’t qualified to teach is a bit alarmist,” she added.

In spite of the crunch to find primary grade teachers, many districts countywide were still able to hire fully credentialed teachers. Like many districts, the Irvine Unified School District, which has an excellent academic reputation, hired 90 teachers in two months this summer, all of them credentialed.

“Irvine will only hire [credentialed] teachers,” said Tom Burnham, a trustee with Irvine Unified.

Districts in southern Orange County, such as Capistrano Unified and Saddleback Valley Unified, also brought more than 200 credentialed teachers onto each of their staffs.

“In Saddleback Valley we are very fortunate because teachers want to teach here,” said Saddleback Valley Board President Dore J. Gilbert, who hired only credentialed instructors. “Some of the districts have to take what they can get. . . . I hate to say that.”

Some local teachers organizations applauded parts of the 144-page report, which was highly critical of the way teachers are recruited and supported. Low pay and little respect drive many promising teachers away from the profession, teachers said.

“We are expected to solve every problem of society and then get kicked when we try,” said Dave Reger, head of Orange Unified Education Assn., which represents about 1,200 teachers in the Orange Unified School District.

Educators admitted it also is common in Orange County for teachers to instruct outside their area of expertise. But they often are kept within their general field.

For instance, say educators, an English teacher usually would only be asked to teach a humanities course such as history. Besides, add educators, good teaching requires more than a mere command of specialized knowledge.

“It’s one thing to know your subject,” Dean said. “But it’s another to know how to teach.”

Also contributing to this report were Times correspondents Enrique Lavin and Julie Fate Sullivan.