Don’t limit scholarship schools’ flexibility to find best teachers
Most of the 31 teachers at Downey Christian School have bachelor’s degrees. We’ve long required that our teachers have them or be working toward them. But in a handful of cases, we’ve made exceptions based on an individual’s other experiences and, more important, their effectiveness.
One of our non-degreed teachers has been here 45 years. She’s stern but caring, and so old-school tough that the only time I can recall her calling in sick is when she took leave for cancer treatment. She’s also an amazing educator with a knack for reading instruction. Listen to her 4-year-olds read from the newspaper, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Our parents love her, and we are lucky to have her. But under a proposal being considered by state lawmakers, bachelor’s degrees would be mandated for teachers like her, who work in private schools that accept students with choice scholarships. If it passes, we’d have to let go one of our best teachers — to our students’ detriment.
I know this proposal is well meaning. But college degrees do not guarantee good teaching. And requiring them would make it even tougher for private schools to find and retain effective teachers.
About 80 percent of our 300 students use schoolchoice scholarships, with 170 of them using the Florida Tax Credit scholarship for lowincome students. The latter are worth about 60 percent of the per-pupil funding for students in public schools — a basic fact that has been ignored in this debate. The result is we have nowhere near the money that public schools do for teacher salaries.
In the past five years, public schools have hired five of our teachers. No one begrudges the teachers’ decisions. But the truth is, if I could have offered them $10,000 more a year, they would have stayed.
It’s hard to find, keep and replace good teachers. It’s even harder with a drastically discounted wage. Our teachers work for less than their public-school peers, yet put in as much blood, sweat and tears. They’re so dedicated because they believe in our mission. But to make up for the stark difference in pay, we need the flexibility to sometimes make out-of-the-box hires.
One of our non-degreed teachers teaches music, manages the library and drives a bus. Yet another has an uncanny ability to calm and re-focus students with behavioral difficulties. Because her mother has been in and out of the hospital for years, she’s helped raised seven siblings, including several with learning disabilities. That’s also why she has yet to earn her degree.
We know which teachers are effective. So do parents. I think our results show that we, and they, have exercised good judgment. According to state-reported test scores, our scholarship students have made steady gains in reading and math over multiple years, even beyond the gains that scholarship students have made statewide. So where’s the problem in need of fixing?
It may seem odd to say, but on this issue, I believe we actually have a lot in common with district schools. Even with greater funding, they, too, face tremendous challenges in hiring teachers, particularly for highpoverty schools, and in finding substitutes when their hires don’t show up.
In Orange County, 1 in 8 teachers is considered chronically absent, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality, and the substitutes who replace them need only a high-school diploma and associates degree or 60 hours of college credits. That situation isn’t ideal, either, but I sympathize. Should we propose that public schools lose their funding if a teacher without a four-year college degree is in the classroom? Of course not.
I know districts are doing the same thing we’re doing: working hard to find the best teachers they can, given the resources that are available.