Credentialed--and Incompetent

An elementary school instructor assesses a sixth-grader’s report as reflecting “excellent” spelling, yet the paper contains such uncorrected gems as “crocidiles,” “phyton,” “medecine,” “Sumatarian tiger” and “The biggest tiger founded was . . . .”

* An English teacher returns a 12th-grade modern literature exam with scores of such uncorrected phrases as, “After McMurphy enrolled to a ward, every patients were encourage to follow the things, they believed in. He hadn’t have a huge goal like averge people . . . .”

* An elementary instructor overlooks the terms “pregnent” and “dissapear” on a sixth-grader’s typed paper but--in his own handwriting--inserts these alleged words: “finaly” and “suspecions.”

Pathetic, indeed, yet each case involves a public schoolteacher who passed the California C-BEST basic skills exam, attended a state-approved teacher training course, received a state teaching credential, was interviewed by school site administrators, hired by a relatively small but well-to-do school district and invited to join the local teachers union.

Union-remunerated spin doctor Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers, says in a recent newspaper advertisement--ironically titled “Ignoring Standards”--that the problem in public schools is not lazy or low-skilled teachers but rather the failure of districts to hire teachers who have taken teacher training courses.

But with 60% of California public schoolteachers trained in Cal State credential courses, union-supported state education schools appear not to be the solution but a rather large component of the quality disconnect.

Those who have taken Cal State teacher credential courses may have noticed that the core classes focus on trendy doctoral dissertation themes like “multicultural socialization” and “interfacing the affective domain,” yet scant attention is paid to future teachers’ personal academic knowledge and proficiency in subjects they will teach.

I recall one soon-to-be credentialed social studies candidate at the Cal State Northridge School of Education who, after I suggested Pearl Harbor as a topic for a ninth-grade lesson on World War II, responded: “What does Pearl Harbor have to do with World War II?”

In the same teaching group was a University of California psychology graduate who was an impressive computer whiz kid, but when the instructor asked her to locate Japan on the wall map, she hesitated and asked: “It’s somewhere near an ocean, isn’t it?”

Halfway through one course, I began to suspect that the professor was grading my assignments without reading them. Determined to expose the charade, I wrote up a list of “appropriate material” for a hypothetical ninth-grade class in world history, including an ancient filmstrip called “The Rise of Settled Village Life.”

“Graphic nudity and drunken orgies” was the phony summary I typed smack in the middle of my class paper (saved for posterity and submitted to this newspaper). The written evaluation by the CSUN education professor with a doctorate from Harvard University began thus: “Good.”

I couldn’t resist asking him why he thought that a filmstrip full of “graphic nudity and drunken orgies” would be appropriate for ninth-graders. He turned beet red, grinned and confessed the obvious--he hadn’t really read my summaries.

My “psychological foundations of education” class was taught by a professor who, upon inquiry, admitted never having worked as an instructor, counselor or psychologist at any K-12 school.

And a required but thoroughly impractical “social foundations of education” class was taught by a professor who had exactly one year of K-12 teaching experience. Why did she quit teaching K-12? I asked her.

“Kids drive me nuts,” she said with a revealing grimace.

In a detailed education report in May, a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote: “In suburban Glendale, a fifth-grade instructor, diagraming the sentence, ‘There was a smear of blood,’ tells the students--wrongly--that ‘smear’ is an adjective. Later, he tells them--wrongly--that ‘his’ is a noun, because it describes a person.”

If--or when--that instructor’s fifth-grade students botch the next Stanford 9 along with other basic skills tests and find themselves ill-prepared for high school, college or a decent job as a result of professional negligence during their formative years, their tax-paying parents can rest assured that many such instructors routinely attend a state-approved teacher training course, get credentials, join a teachers guild and look forward to lifetime job tenure without fear of demotion, transfer or termination for lack of competency.

Only when California’s teacher training schools and K-12 site administrators begin to eliminate low-skilled and negligent personnel will academic excellence have a fighting chance in every public classroom.