Why Should Teachers Be Hired for Subject Matter Rather Than Certification?

 Families, communities, and nations are stronger when parents and community leaders know how to hire the best teachers. The children of our nation are currently being indoctrinated in anti-American ideas that serve to deepen and widen the chasm in America.

Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, shared his experience of hiring teachers in the private K-12 school that he founded. He understood the dangers of recruiting certified teachers rather than subject-matter experts. 

From my previous work as a college history professor, I know that the people least prepared to teach a subject are education majors. Requiring an embarrassingly low minimum of credit hours to be certified to teach a subject—just four courses in some states—education majors encounter the least substance and rigor, but the maximum of racialist theory and left-wing ideology in their program.

If my new school was going to succeed in teaching at the highest levels, then I would have to find subject-matter experts with a heart for teaching. That’s what we did—and what thousands of schools in this country do, because of the humiliating, yet expensive, reality of teacher licensure.

But don’t just take my word for it; the evidence is unequivocal: Traditional public schools have an abysmal education record. Not only are scores as low as ever on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, but internationally, our math scores remain poor and uncompetitive.

Much of the blame lies with teacher education programs and state certification mandates that bolster education schools’ enrollment and subject teachers to radical activist ideology. 

Education schools are besieged by critical race theory and identity politics, stereotyping everyone as part of oppressor groups or oppressed groups. They prefer ethnic studies and historical studies that denigrate America or anything patriotic. 

And while states have been offering alternative routes to teacher certification, the vast majority of teachers are educated and certified through university-based colleges of education. This ought to stop. 

States should end requirements for prospective teachers to be certified, and instead empower schools to hire based on subject-matter expertise. At the same time, on the national level, we can take the Trump administration’s reform of college accreditation as a model….

Roberts shared other ideas of how to improve the teachers working in America’s schools. If families, communities, and nations are to be strong, the rising generation must be taught the material that will strengthen, rather than weaken, them.