The door opens

摘要

Are you reasonably well educated, in mid-career, and do you sometimes think of chucking it all in and becoming a schoolteacher? If so, you are not alone. A growing number of teachers in American state schools have entered the classroom in their mature years. State governments, fearing a teacher shortage, have made it easier for clever people to switch into education from other fields. And a lot of Americans have decided that public-school teaching is not such a rotten job after all. Some 45 states and the District of Columbia now offer an "alternative route" to a teacher's licence, up from only a handful in the 1980s. Alternative certification (AC) generally allows individuals with a university degree to begin teaching immediately after passing an entrance examination. These recruits, watched over by a mentor, teach the subject they studied at university, and take education courses at a sponsoring university while drawing their salaries. Some 175,000 teachers have been trained in this way, says Emily Feistritzer, president of the National Centre for Education Information. The centre has found that 20 states have created 34 new AC programmes of this sort in the past three years, and it reckons that as many as a third of all new teachers now enter the profession this way. This is a breathtaking departure in the staid world of public education.