Alternative Pathways Into Teaching

Reemergence of Alternative Routes into Teaching in the 1980s

There are several reasons for the tremendous growth of nontraditional routes into teaching in the United States since the early 1980s. First, the reason most often cited for states permitting alternative teacher certification and for the growth of these programs is the need to fill perceived or real teaching vacancies in critical shortage areas such as special education, mathematics, and science, and shortages in hard-to-staff schools in urban and remote rural school districts. The rationale here has been that alternative pathways into teaching will attract teachers who would not otherwise consider teaching and that these teachers will be equipped to do a better job of teaching, and stay longer than the many emergency-licensed teachers who had been filling these teaching vacancies in critical shortage areas.

Another reason for the growth of alternative routes into teaching has been the desire to attract particular kinds of individuals into teaching regardless of their areas of specialization who it was felt would not otherwise enter the teaching force. These include efforts to attract, prepare, and retain more [Page 96]teachers of color so that the teaching force better reflects the racial and ethnic demographics of students in the public schools, and efforts to attract more men, midlife career changers, and in some areas of the country retired military personnel.

A third reason for the growth in alternative routes into teaching has been dissatisfaction with college and university programs for allegedly not supplying teachers who are willing to teach in the poverty-impacted schools that most need them and/or for the perceived low quality of the teachers they have produced. It has been argued that alternative routes will attract more academically capable teachers and teachers who are better prepared than those from traditional programs to go into hard-to-staff poverty-impacted schools, be successful, and stay there over time. Some of those who support alternative routes into teaching because of their dissatisfaction with the quality of work in traditional college and university programs have felt that alternative routes will serve as a catalyst for reforming college and university teacher education, and/or provide the opportunity for research to understand the effectiveness of different approaches to preparing teachers.

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