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Letter: Teaching certificates are necessary to ensure children receive a good education

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Marci Weatherspoon works on a reading assignment with students in her first grade class at Crescent Elementary in Sandy on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2020.

As a teacher who is entering her 20th year of teaching, I have many issues with Nathan Flynn’s opinion piece titled “Occupational licensing could reduce teacher shortages.” Flynn posits the following ideas: that education certifications “are almost completely unnecessary for educators to obtain,” that a teaching certificate is “a piece of arbitrary government regulation” and that obtaining certification would take several more years of classes on top of bachelor’s degree.

First and foremost, Flynn seems to be uneducated about the fact that content knowledge is only one part of teaching. While earning a teaching certificate, usually as part of a four-year degree, a person learns how to manage a classroom full of children with a variety of needs – ranging from children coming from home situations that are less than ideal, to children with special needs, and everything in between.

Prospective teachers also learn how to take content knowledge and turn it into a curriculum as well as learning pedagogical principles that are necessary in order to ensure that students are able to learn, retain, apply and think critically about information.

In addition, I have worked with several teachers who have come into teaching, without certification, from a variety of careers. Without exception, these teachers struggle, sometimes for years, with all the aforementioned things that are part of traditional teacher training as they work toward obtaining certification in an alternate format, which involves taking classes while teaching.

Teaching certification is not arbitrary government regulation, it is essential in ensuring that children receive a good education from professionals who are qualified to teach them.

What is essential is paying teachers a salary that reflects the difficult, demanding and often thankless job they do in educating our nation’s children.

Cara Bailey, Salt Lake City

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