Hey folks - had some offline conversations with people this weekend about this as well, and I think my viewpoint is become a bit more refined about the higher ed piece. @Peregrin5 you raise a good point about some of what I'm talking about already being a part of higher ed. So, I guess my main point is not so much "no free college," and more of "let's support publicly funded if we can revise it to be lean, efficient, and targeted toward what we need for an economy.
The difference is a bachelor's degree usually requires a lot of unrelated classes in order to be more "well rounded" which is not necessarily bad, but it doesn't usually lead to information that the person will need to do the job they are being trained to do. Does someone doing network support really need an elective is psychology, anthropology, religion, or a foreign language? Sure there are university degrees where some of these things help the person in their future endeavors, but are they really necessary?
But I was referring to why you thought a certification may be valuable based on whether it was hands on...etc. and why this is not the same case with a regualr degree?
California does not require a degree in education for elementary teachers. In New York do you have to take certification classes or just a test after the bachelors degree?
Part of it is probably due to demand for teachers. If you require a BA in Education, that eliminates a lot of candidates who have a BA in something else but want to switch into teaching. Most states do require some sort of credential program. In CA you have to do an extra year past your BA, and you don't really get any degree for it. You just meet the requirements to apply for a credential with the state, and then you can teach. In OR I learned that that extra year actually gives you a Masters in Education, and that it's normal for every teacher in Oregon to get their Masters within 5 years. What this actually means is that teachers can teach straight out of their BA without any education classes, and have to fulfill the requirements for the MA within 5 years otherwise their credential expires. It's the same kind of classes that they do in the CA credentialing program, but you do it while you're teaching and you get a degree out of it.
In California you need a bachelor's degree in any field to be able to teach elementary, however, you have to take a credential program after your bachelors, this is the education classes.
In California, you have to complete the credential program to get a teaching job (in most cases). As Pashtun said, you get student teaching experiences and education classes during this year long program. Then you complete a bunch of portfolio based tests and apply for a credential. THEN you can start applying for jobs. California has some of the strictest credential requirements out of any state. You need to have 60 or so hours of classroom experience (which you usually have to get as an unpaid volunteer) before you can even apply to the credentialing program, and you have to have passed all of the requisite general knowledge and subject matter tests.
I am pretty sure this is an option, but California wanted people to be specialized as well. For me, I got to pursue a long time dream to become bilingual and major in Spanish.
Yeah I think the programs are VERY similar. You double major, here it is a credential program which probably requires similar number of class credits. It sounds like essentially they are the same amount of class work, maybe slightly less for the credential, not sure.
Not more than a handful of Californians who earn credentials each year have gone through a blended undergrad-and-credential sequence and majored in education, and not more than a couple of institutions offer education majors. On balance, I see this not as a bug of California teacher education but as a feature - well, aside from the fact that what aspiring elementary educators tend to major in is liberal studies, and remarkably many of them (and their professors) seem to have succumbed to the notion that coursework that doesn't rub one's nose in its practicality for one's intended career is unnecessary or even useless.
I could see this as being made to take either too many credits and kill yourself during your undergrad career, or if it were a specialized "History and Ed" major, not covering either subject well enough to make one fully an expert in either history or education. (maybe education) Also there's the chance that taking 4 years of an education major, you get into teaching and decide you hate it, well, there goes four years and tons of money spent. Whereas, if you get the year long credential and you find you hate it, you only lose a year of time and tuition and can at least fall back on your major. From my experiences in my credential courses I could not take four years of all of the bunk they made us do, none of which made its way into my teaching practice, or prepared me at all for the classroom.
