Arizona’s answer to teacher crisis? Fill the vacancies with warm bodies
Let’s call it the Warm Body Law. If it’s even that. “It” is the new law Gov. Doug Ducey so eagerly signed into law. So eager that he tweeted “Sent it my way!” before the bill had passed out of the state Senate.
The new law? One that allows folks without any teaching credentials to lead our kids in classrooms across Arizona, as long as they have at least five years of experience in “relevant fields.” Those fields? “Any content area.”
Ducey’s excitement didn’t abate after the bill became law with his signature, saying, “Let’s reform teacher certification and get more great teachers in AZ classrooms!”
Ducey sure likes exclamation points. But he should be concerned with a couple of other points.
In case he hasn’t noticed, education in Arizona is K-12, not 9-12. This plan does nothing, nothing, to place qualified teachers in the hundreds of now-empty elementary classrooms across our state. So the plan he gushes about does little to help with the all-important foundational learning that goes on in kids’ earlier years. Unless, of course, an accountant qualifies to be an elementary teacher under Ducey’s law.
A second point the governor is ignorant about is his assumption that people with content-area experience will be, as he tweeted, “great teachers.” His law doesn’t do anything to spell out what “relevant experience” is, other than to be employed in those areas and have a degree. Beyond that, Ducey assumes experience equals “great teachers.”
In some cases, maybe. But let’s not take for granted that knowledge means someone will naturally be a great teacher, as Ducey does. People coming from a private-industry background all too often don’t realize just how difficult, timeconsuming and exhausting good teaching is. How will these men and women react when confronted with the myriad demands of leading a classroom?
And then there’s the elephant point in the room, the obvious fact that his plan does nothing, nothing, to improve what has caused those thousands of empty classrooms, the abysmal pay our teachers earn. How many outstanding, betterpaid workers will actually change careers for much less money?
I wonder if at most we will get folks who essentially are warm bodies, not particularly successful in their current careers but qualified under Ducey’s law.
I wonder, too, about the silence of Diane Douglas and the state Board of Education on this scheme. Douglas, as usual, popped up briefly to tout her Trumpian plan to add $800 million to the education budget. Then promptly and predictably disappeared. And nary a peep from the board.
This plan so embraced by the ecstatic Education Governor is little more than window dressing, a slap at the teachers who went through the process that Ducey calls “outdated rules,” and a poor attempt to avoid a real solution to the teacher shortage, meaningful pay. But the Education Governor is too busy being the Koch Brothers Governor to go there.
Mike McClellan is a Gilbert resident and a retired Mesa Public Schools teacher. Email him at mmcclellan3141@ msn.com.