Barriers to entry are a good thing.
According to this story from New Jersey, “Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass the Praxis Core Test, a basic skills test for reading, writing, and math that is administered by the state’s Commissioner of Education.”
As of January 1st, Act 1669 removed the basic skills testing requirement, ostensibly to fill the need for more teachers.
“According to Read Lion, the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), a teachers union that is associated with the National Education Association (NEA), was a driving force behind the bill and called the testing requirement “an unnecessary barrier” to those who want to teach but may not perform well on standardized exams.”
You have to give them credit for sheer shamelessness. It beggars belief, but it keeps working. The “defenders of children and public education” literally pushed through a bill to get less literate, less accomplished teachers into classrooms.
The motivation is transparent. More “teachers” means more dues-paying members to fund the political machine.
“Erika Sanzi, former educator and current director of outreach at Parents Defending Education, a national grassroots organization, spoke to the National News Desk about why she is against Act 1669.
“It’s important to know that the teachers union, specifically in this case, the NEA, pushes really hard for this. I’m a former member of the NEA in two states. Generally, whatever they push for, tends to be something that’s not particularly good for students,” said Sanzi. “The NEA wants to eliminate all barriers to teaching because that increases their number of dues-paying members, and when that’s your mission, student learning and quality control really aren’t priorities at all and so that’s a concern, for sure…
These are low-rigor tests. We’re not talking about the LSAT here. So the fact that the failure rates on these tests have been so high for so long, that is a problem. That’s really an indictment of not only of the education system that these aspiring teachers are coming out of but the colleges of education that give them a degree even though they’re not remotely qualified.”
When it comes to teacher unions, it is never about education, and never about the best interest of students. The goal is maximizing political power at the expense of the education systems they parasitize.