What Public Schooling and CBS News Have in Common

Neither one bases its actions on sound research. [Here's an excerpt from my most recent op/ed for the Mackinac Center, which has already run in the print edition of the Oakland (Michigan) Press. Visit Mackinac's website for the complete text with links.]

A quarter of Michigan’s charter school teachers are not government certified. At the schools run by Charter School Administration Services, nearly two-thirds are uncertified.
These statistics were the subject of universal hand-wringing during a State Board of Education meeting this month. The Board’s President, Kathleen Straus, called them “pretty scary.” Charter schools spokesman Dan Quisenberry subsequently explained how charter schools’ urban settings lead to lower teacher certification rates, but no one directly challenged the idea that teacher certification is a critical factor in student learning.
In Michigan, the only requirement for initial certification is that the candidate graduate from a government-approved teacher training program. To continue working for more than six years, teachers must eventually complete some additional training classes.
Are teachers college graduates really better at raising student achievement than teachers who lack that pedagogical pedigree? Much has been written on this subject, most of it grossly flawed. After sifting through the research in 2001, Kate Walsh of the Abell Foundation identified seven well-designed studies of the effects of teacher certification on student achievement. All of them concluded that “New teachers who are certified do not produce greater student gains than new teachers who are not certified.”
Needless to say, Walsh’s review of the research sparked controversy. Linda Darling-Hammond, a leading advocate of certification with whose work Walsh had found considerable fault, wrote a harsh critique of Walsh’s findings. That critique was soon persuasively rebutted, however, by a joint response from Walsh and education economist Michael Podgursky. A preponderance of evidence now suggests that college of education degrees really don’t lead to better teaching in most cases.
So what does? [...]

Read on, dear reader, read on.