This morning, I read Arthur Goldstein's latest blog post. Arthur, is a relatively recently retired NYC public school teacher, a UFT (United Federation of Teachers) chapter leader, and a frequent critic of Michael Mulgrew, the current and long term UFT president.

I'm a union guy through and through but I also, like Arthur, believe that UFT's leadership is neither pro-teacher nor pro-student but rather pro-themselves. It's a rather sad state of affairs.

Today, Arther shared Mulgrew's latest "accomplishment." He, along with the city and state have relaxed the requirements for bilingual and ENL (English as a new language) certifications. This is in response to the recent massive influx of newcomers.

The deal has two parts. The first makes all the sense in the world. If a teacher holds the credentials for multiple certifications - one for bilingual and one not, they will be able to activate the bilingual cert with no penalty - that is they won't lose salary, tenure, seniority or anything else. This should always have been the case and it should in fact he true, or at least partially true for any certification area. Maybe not the tenure thing but even in that case, there should be some modified rule to encourage teachers to switch to their most needed certification and not be penalized for doing so.

The second part is the problematic one. They're easing the requirements for the bilingual certification. Now, instead of completing the coursework and taking an standardized assessment, you only have to do one or the other. That is, take a standardized test, a single instance platform on which success certainly doesn't indicate a teacher is qualified or take a handful of courses.

Arthur was lamenting over the exam, but given the number of education programs in NY where you just show up and earn an "A" or even for some you barely have to show up, this is basically just a rubber stamp for bilingual teachers.

Here's the language from the UFT's release on the program:

Certified teachers and pupil personnel services professionals (i.e., social workers, school counselors and psychologists) can now complete either the examination requirement or the enrollment and education requirements, instead of both. That means candidates can pass the Bilingual Education Assessment and/or the Content Specialty Test in ESOL, if available, in lieu of completing coursework and matriculating in a registered program leading to a bilingual education extension and/or an ENL certificate.

This struck me as awfully similar to the CS SOCE (Statement of Continued Eligibility). In New York State, even though we now have computer science certification, they created the SOCE which basically said that as long as you taught a single CS class in the last couple of years, if you fill out a form, you'll be essentially certified to teach any CS in your school for the next 10 years.

Both of these initiatives attempt to address the lack of qualified teachers. Bilingual for the influx of new non native English speakers and CS for the new field of study that the city and state have been pushing.

Both of these initiatives will, and in the Case of CS have resulted in students being served by unqualified teachers both now and for the next decade and such actions should be criminal.

True, some teachers thrown into a CS classroom know their stuff and some are working diligently to learn but many aren't there and to many are making no serious move to get there.

In each of my first to cohorts for Hunter's advanced certificate program, I had well over 100 applicants. These were supposed to be the most prepared of the city's CS teachers - all culled through the CS4All program and most had completed multiple years of New York's CS training - much of which was provided by organizations like Code.org.

My CS prerequisites were pretty simple - a code sample in a text based language that showed some basics. A program with a function that returned the smallest value in an array or list of numbers would have covered all the requirements and then some. That's also a typical early assignment in a CS0 class.

Each year, only a very small number of applicants - something like under 10, maybe under 15, could complete this, another handful were able to, with the help of self study resources like the Runestone academy's Python or Java texts got up to speed. Each of the first two cohorts had a little over 20 students including a handful of masters candidates. All of the masters candidates came in with more than the required CS background.

Now, for those applicants who learned what they needed and were accepted, my hat was off to them, they worked hard and did what they had to do. They were great members of the cohort.

On the other hand, of the hundreds who never followed up, many had no idea what I meant by "in a text based language like Python, Java, or Javascript," or similar parts of the application - and many of them had been teaching CS for multiple years and attending DOE training for multiple years.

Now, New York State comes along and says that they can all teach CS for 10 more years, no questions asked.

The kids will suffer.

How can the state get away with this? They don't care. Neither do the teacher's Unions (and again, I'm a big Union guy) - their current teachers can do whatever they want and all is good. The students don't know how they're being harmed and overall, parents are none the wiser. I've mentioned that a number of my Hunter undergrads came in having scored a 3, 4, or frequently 5 on APCS-Principals and while some had a good background, way more than should have would have been better off not taking anything. All these kids were super bright and motivated. It wasn't there fault they were sold a bill of goods.

Back to the bilingual issue - again, the DOE, NYSED and UFT can get away with it because on the surface, it looks good - we can teach our newcomers but they're the ones who will suffer. And of course, they're a population with no voice.

Should be criminal.

So, that's my rant for the day. I promise, more CS teaching content and positive posts to come.