Issue Position: Education

Issue Position

Maryland's fine schools represent one of its biggest and best achievements. For the past five years, Education Week has ranked Maryland's public schools as first in the country. I pledge to continue to support measures in Annapolis that will keep Maryland at the top of this prestigious ranking. However, there is no reason why we cannot aspire to make our schools even better.

I am most concerned that Maryland's schools have consistently suffered from shortages of qualified teachers, especially in science, math, technology, foreign language and special education. Unless these shortages are overcome, it is inevitable that Maryland's top ranking will decline, for young people inadequately instructed in science, math and technology in particular will take the standardized tests which are an important component of this ranking with one arm tied behind their backs. Nor will they be qualified for the more sophisticated technical jobs that will become available in the next thirty years.

The same Education Week which rated Maryland's schools first in the nation also graded Maryland's teaching profession and only awarded it a low B, and a 2011 assessment by the National Council on Teacher Quality gave Maryland's teacher policies a grade of D+.

In some of my spare time, I serve as the President of the Calvert Institute for Policy Research. Recently the Calvert Institute issued a comprehensive 51 page study of Maryland's teacher certification policies. It concluded that Maryland's teacher shortages have been largely caused by Maryland's particularly burdensome traditional teacher certification policies, which function as barriers and disincentives to entering the teaching profession.

The educational and training requirements of traditional teacher certification are designed to enhance the quality of the teaching force; however study after study has found that our existing certification requirements have failed to produce any observable effect on teacher performance. In fact, many studies have reported that alternatively certified teachers outperform their traditionally certified counterparts.

In my own household, I have observed the inadequacy of Maryland's certification standards. My mother taught in a local private middle school for 19 years. She had attended Bryn Mawr College and had received a liberal arts degree but had never taken any courses that lead to traditional teaching certification. In order to keep her teaching job, she was required to take at least one such teaching course each summer. She always aced these courses, receiving the top grades in her classes, but, when I inquired whether her formal instruction in teaching had helped her improve her classroom performance, she replied that the courses were mostly worthless and that she was never able to use anything she had learned in her classrooms.

Nationally, over the course of the past five years, 40% of new teacher hires have been alternatively certified, but in Maryland only 12% of new teacher hires fall into this category, and 93% of the alternatively certified new teacher hires in Maryland occurred in Baltimore City and Prince George's County. Baltimore County has self-identified itself as a geographic area of projected teacher shortage, but it has not made it a practice to hire alternatively certified teachers.

In the words of the recent Calvert Institute study, "Maryland can make substantial progress toward resolving its shortage of public school teachers and strengthening its teaching force by altering and curtailing the state-mandated certification requirements that currently serve as barriers to entering and remaining in the teaching profession. This will allow Maryland to attract greater numbers of candidates interested in teaching and get them into the classrooms more quickly, thereby helping address Maryland's long-term teacher shortages." I support this conclusion and if elected will make it one of my goals to strengthen Maryland's cadre of teachers by promoting new standards that will facilitate more robust hiring of well-qualified teachers who have not obtained formal degrees in teaching.

The bottom line: I will fight to maintain the first place ranking of Maryland's public schools and will endeavor to change the rules and regulations that currently place roadblocks in the way of using alternative certification standards for school teachers, particularly in the disciplines of science, math and technology, where the State has experienced continuing shortages of qualified teachers.

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