What makes a good teacher?

IF THIS isn’t the best example of how credentials have come to displace talent in American education, this little item from Saturday’s In the News column will do until something even worse comes along, and something tells us it will, as surely as bad becomes worse. Just listen to this:

“Ann Marie Corgill, Alabama’s 2014-15 Teacher of the Year and a national Teacher of the Year finalist, said she has resigned after 21 years of teaching in grades one through six after state officials told her she’s not certified to teach her fifth-grade class at a Birmingham school.”

That kind of thing is certifiable, all right, but certifiable as in crazy. Talk about technicality replacing reality in American education, here we have only the latest instance of this madness, which tends to pop up in other professions, too. We all should have known something was seriously amiss when folks started talking about professions instead of callings. One thing’s for sure: Ms. Corgill will be missed—sorely— by those families who had counted on her being around to teach their fifthgraders, and will feel cheated. And have every right to.

We can remember talking to an economist turned educational researcher at Stanford, Eric Hanushek, who’s spent a lifetime examining and dissecting statistics about education. When asked what makes a good teacher, his response was as concise as it was refreshing, as humble as it was honest: “We don’t know.”

Yet students, parents and other teachers don’t seem to have all that much trouble distinguishing the best teachers they’ve ever had from the worst. Indeed, they always remember—they don’t seem able to forget—the best teacher they’ve ever had. Years later they’ll talk about the experience with still undimmed passion. You can scarcely get them to stop talking about it. It’s like asking a baseball fan about the best game he ever saw. The floodgates of memory are opened.

Teaching, too, is still at least as much an art, even sport, as it is a science. And most of us don’t need to see the results of any scientific-sounding certification papers to tell the difference. Any more than Beethoven needed a degree in music or Michelangelo a diploma on the wall testifying to his official status as an artist. Their work spoke for itself, and still does to anyone with ears to hear, eyes to see, and a spirit to be sent soaring.

All of which is something to keep in mind as the ever-encroaching jungle of educanto begins to overrun surer guides like personal experience. Which may be the moral of this Kafkaesque tale of virtue unrewarded, even unrecognized, in Alabama as the requirements of bureaucracy take precedence over reality there, too..

So beware: Liberty isn’t the only thing that requires eternal vigilance. So does education, the real thing, rather than some paper substitute.