Val-
Jumping in late and without quotes but I wanted to say that I very much appreciate your analysis in this thread.
I am a school administrator and a former teacher. I also spent 3 years training new teachers. I have never worked in a union school, as all of my 12 years have been in a charter school. That means: no tenure, no seniority, no merit pay. Our pay scale is 4% lower than the neighboring district but because we do not pay union dues, it is nearly a wash. People often say that charter teachers work for less. That's simply not true in CA anyway. My teachers work hard to keep their jobs every year. We accept applications yearly and hire the best new candidates and let go of those that don't meet our standards.
Now- the teacher testing is abysmal. My anecdotal evidence- I have a BA in Foreign Languages from a private university outside of the state. Due to backwards credentialing rules, California would not "honor" this as subject matter competency in Spanish and Russian and allow me to teach, without two more years of undergrad at a CA university. Since I had a few courses in US history, I decided to take the SSAT and Praxis for a Social Studies credential instead.
At my test, more than half of the room was taking the exam for their THIRD time. Stories filled the lunch conversation about those who had also failed the basic skills test repeatedly. You can't even sign up without a BA or a BS- yet these potential teachers couldn't pass the basic skills test! Unfortunately, many of these teachers were already multiple subject (elementary) teachers looking to add an authorization to their credentials. They were already working with little kids!
I passed the first time and scored very highly (not tooting my own horn). I find this also absurd. I have many courses in US history and political theory. That's all- but the state says I'm fully qualified to teach Psychology, Economics, World History, Ancient History and Sociology and Anthropology. The only economics I remember is guns and butter in high school. I would destroy any class of students expecting an education in that!
I have since also passed two other state exams without prepping or studying but by mere educated guessing. I've learned that the testmakers are not brilliant either and they do not check for duplicity in the questions. So if you have a remotely decent short term memory, you just flip back two pages and find the definition of the multiple choice question you're trying to answer.
What's all this say about me? I'm a very good teacher, an excellent administrator and all of this is due to my own reading, researching, personal education and goals.
What's this say about teacher testing and credentialing? That it's basically a joke. There's no reason that you should be able to guess your way through a competency exam and score high enough (50-65% depending on the test, I believe) to pass.
