barriers to certification

As for the usefulness of ed schools and quickly getting top-notch people into the classroom, another friend wrote:

I've asked this question to several "educators" (I had 800 math SATs, broke the curve on just about every math test I ever took in high school and college  level, was on my math team in high school and my father was a teacher for 30 years): Could I be hired for no pay to teach math at your school four hours a week if I expressed interest in doing that?  And they look at me with a blank expression and say, "Of course not.  You don't know how to  teach."

My son's teachers are amazed that he was doing multiplication in kindergarten.  But I'm not "qualified" to teach math.  Not that I would ever have done it, though 4 hours a week I might have.  But the answer just always was my test of whether this "educator" had any sense of creativity.

But of course if you're a public school  teacher (and I went to public school and  so do my kids), what a threat it would be for some hot shot from the private sector to come into your school for no pay and dare to think he could teach the kids something you can't.  So it will never happen.  So my kid learns from me and the other kids will never get that benefit of learning math from somebody who can teach them to just visualize numbers and how they relate to other numbers to the point they just jump off the page.

The real issue here is not whether schools should be taking in uncertified teachers a few hours a week to teach kids -- that's not realistic on any large scale if only due to the logistics, and it’s fraught with all sorts of other problems.  But what if my friend wanted to become a full-time teacher?  Instead of quickly getting him into the classroom, in most districts he would be shooed away and told to waste two years at some bogus ed school before he was "qualified" to teach.  What rubbish!  This is precisely the problem that the new program Dean Steiner talks about above is meant to address.