Emergency-hired teachers without degrees as effective as licensed educators

In a hypothetical future where there is no degree requirement, whatever they’re doing now to assess applicants is not relevant. In that scenario, the system has fundamentally changed, and I think this strongly implies that employers will now need to look for ways to screen candidates other than “has degree”.

As things stand now, there is an expectation that holding a degree is in itself valuable and that the holder has already been assessed by the educational institution that granted the degree.

Put another way, the lack of a reliable process now is the point. If I’m an employer, the reliability of the signal that is the degree the applicant holds is as variable as the standards of the various institutions granting those degrees. In a world where the degree is no longer a primary signal, employers must by necessity establish some other assessment criteria, and since that criteria is set by the employer, it’s at least more reliable than making decisions based on various other organization’s assessment criteria.

You have to pass the same rigorous tests. Degree can be substituted for relevant work experience.

The biomedical engineers designing your artificial heart and gene therapy have no professional licensing requirements whatsoever. A professional license to do medical engineering doesn't even exist.

https://www.bpelsg.ca.gov/applicants/flowchart_for_fe.pdf

Eg., if you want to be a graphic designer, apply, perform the "graphic designer assessment by AssessCorpX" as required by IndustryX and so on.

Basically just taking the examiniation function away from universities into the market, and making it industry specific. I think these are the 'natural incentives' businesses have, and these are distorted by the gov monopoly granted to universtiites (ie., their degree awarding powers).

Prior to the era of mass university education people were hired based on a judgement of their suitability for the role, and then trained to do it over a period of years. That's still how things work.

> One preliminary explanation from the New Jersey study was that the emergency licensed teachers were working in schools that had a record of helping students make strong academic gains. It’s possible that the schools had supports in place, such as teacher coaching, a strong curriculum or something else that compensated for less training... Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory.

> There’s some evidence that teacher licensure tests are mildly accurate predictors of who will be a good educator. All else equal, a school would be better off selecting candidates with a higher test score, especially if they’re going to be teaching math or science. But that general rule would mischaracterize a lot of teachers — some test well but don’t have great classroom management or interpersonal skills, while others may not test well but are effective at working with children.

I'm not an expert, but my impression of modern classrooms is that teachers don't have as much leeway to choose what or how they teach, compared to, say 50 years ago. They have a strictly defined curriculum to get through, and they're generally spending a lot of their classroom hours teaching to standardized tests. Might the difference in "classroom management" skill, which is evidently untested in teacher licensing, be the most significant thing left that can make one teacher better than another? That is, if we make teachers (essentially) read from the same script, maybe it's all in the delivery?

And if this is untested in teacher licensing, maybe it's somewhat evenly distributed between licensed and unlicensed teachers?