IDOE to have public hearings

The Indiana Department of Education will have three public hearings throughout the state to address citizens’ testimonies concerning the new teacher-licensing proposal to be implemented by the state department.

The proposal, put out by superintendent of public instruction Dr. Tony Bennett includes shifting the focus away from how secondary educators teach a subject to what is being taught by the teacher as well as allowing more flexibility in hiring superintendents and principals.

Despite the Indiana Professional Standard’s vote of 15-4 in favor of the proposal, educators, board members and citizens still have major concerns.

The state has set up three separate public hearing dates in Rochester, Scottsburg and Indianapolis for Hoosiers to attend.

Gerardo Gonzalez, dean of the IU School of Education, is attending the public hearing in Indianapolis on Nov. 2, where he will present a testimony commenting on the educator-licensing proposal.

The department of education wants to ensure that those admitted to secondary education programs focus more on content than how a subject is being taught, according to the proposal.

Currently, six out of IU’s eight campuses’ education schools require more content knowledge than the major would in mathematics and English, according to The Indiana Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

“These facts have been presented to the Indiana professionals and the department of education,” Gonzalez said. “And they keep repeating something they know isn’t true.”

On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said it was a good sign that colleges of education want to start making self-policing more seriously, a statement that goes directly against the new proposal, Gonzalez said.

“A lot of things the proposal says goes against what Arne Duncan said,” Gonzalez said. “The proposal is not research-based at all.”

The department of education claims that courses offered through the school of education do not satisfy the same requirements as courses that are currently required for actual majors, said Cam Savage, communications director for the department of education.

“We believe that future teachers are going to need a much deeper emphasis on the content they will be teaching,” Savage said. “If the math department truly believed other classes were the same in education schools as they are in theirs, they would be handing out math degrees.”

The Indiana Professional Standards Board will meet twice in November to review the testimonies made at the public hearings. The earliest date for the proposal is July 2010, Savage said.

However, this presents a problem for students who have already been accepted to the education school and will not graduate by 2010, Gonzalez said.

“It could be that students now will follow one curriculum and next year they’ll
ollow another one,” Gonzalez said. “It creates a lot of problems for the ones who are creating the curriculums.”

The concern that has taken precedent among educators is state involvement in the schools of education’s curriculum, Gonzalez said.

“The biggest problem with this proposal is that it represents an incursion into the education program from an external entity that should not be in the position of regulating the curriculum,” Gonzalez said. “They do not know the intricacies of what goes into making the curriculum.”

Current licensing rules are intending to move back to previous standards where the state was more prescriptive in authorizing the body of classes, Savage said.

“We don’t tell the school of education how they need to do it,” Savage said. “We simply say these are the parameters ... we don’t prescribe the exact remedy.”