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The new doubts about teachers have led to a state-by-state demand from legislators and citizen groups that teachers take special examinations to prove they are competent, much like the student competency exams that have become a requirement in 38 states. Asks Indiana State Senator Joan Gubbins: "Shouldn't we first see if the teachers are competent before we expect the kids to be competent?"
With 41 million pupils, public school education is one of the nation's largest single government activities. Current expenditures (federal, state and local) run to $95 billion. So vast and costly an educational system does not cheerfully react to criticism or adapt to change.
The push toward testing teacher competency, however, depends less on Washington than on state and local governments. One of the most instructive battles fought over the issue occurred in Mobile, Ala., and was led by conservative attorney Dan Alexander, president of the board of education. In 1978, after the board required competency testing of Mobile high school seniors, Alexander was besieged by angry parents, at least partly because 53% of the students who took the city's first competency exam flunked it. Recalls Alexander: "Parents came out of the woodwork saying, 'If you're going to crack down on my child, let me tell you about some of my children's teachers.' " One parent brought him a note sent home by a fifth-grade teacher with a master's degree, which read in part: "Scott is dropping in his studies he acts as if he don't Care. Scott want pass in his assignment at all, he a had a poem to learn and he fell to do it." Says Alexander: "I was shocked. I could not believe we had teachers who could not write a grammatically correct sentence. I took the complaints down to the superintendent, and what shocked me worse was that he wasn't shocked."
Alexander made the note public as the kickoff of a campaign for teacher testing. Says he: "Competency testing is probably a misnomer. You cannot test a teacher on whether he's competent, but you certainly can prove he's incompetent." The proposed exams for veteran teachers were blocked by Alexander's colleagues on the board. But they agreed that all new teachers should score at least 500 on the Educational Testing Service's 3½-hr. National Teacher Examination (N.T.E.) which measures general knowledge, reading, writing and arithmetic. Only about half of the Mobile job applicants who took the N.T.E. in 1979 passed.
The American Federation of Teachers, which has 550,000 members, is opposed to testing experienced teachers, though it approves competency exams for new candidates. The much larger National Education Association is against any kind of competency testing for teachers, claiming teacher competency cannot be measured by written tests. Even so, some form of teacher testing has been approved in twelve states.* Proposals for teacher testing have been introduced in Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, New York, Vermont and Wisconsin, and a bill in Oklahoma is scheduled to be signed into law this week. Polls say the teacher-testing movement is supported by 85% of U.S. adults.