TLN member Ariel Sacks is frustrated with the Catch-22 of teacher certification: Teachers who use their diverse education backgrounds to make the curriculum relevant to their students are denied certification in New York because their expertise does not align with traditional school curriculum.
Sacks is confused and outraged by this “old-fashioned bias":
The policies around having “highly qualified” teachers in every classroom just aren’t adding up for me right now. A brand-new NYC Teaching Fellow with a degree in European history and no course work in education would be considered a highly qualified social studies teacher in the state’s eyes.
Exactly how does one get “certified”? …