The Impact of Alternate Routes to Teaching

How Teacher Preparation Has Changed, and Why It May Need to Change More

By C. Emily Feistritzer

Who would have thought 25 years ago, when New Jersey created its then-controversial alternate route to teacher certification, that having such quick paths to the classroom would be a criterion for the distribution of huge sums of federal money, as it is in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative? While New Jersey, and subsequently other states, created such alternatives as a way to improve the quality of the teaching force by offering programs attractive to liberal arts graduates, alternate routes have been derided by some as substandard, “scab programs,” and merely fast-track ways of getting warm bodies into classrooms.

So why are about one-third of new teachers hired in this country coming through some 600 programs being implemented under the umbrella of 125 state alternate routes to certification, with such options available in nearly every state?

Moreover, why are scores if not hundreds of thousands of individuals with at least a bachelor’s degree attracted to these programs as a way to enter teaching? Why are career-switchers, men, people of color, mathematicians, scientists, and recent graduates of top universities all over the country trying to get into teaching through alternate routes? And why are colleges of education becoming big...