Non-traditional licenses — Uplink Archive

Virginia schools are increasingly hiring teachers with alternative licenses who lack traditional qualifications like passing the PRAXIS I exam, prompting concern from officials and educators about whether these temporarily licensed teachers should be in classrooms. Journalists investigated the scope and placement of alternatively licensed teachers across school districts to determine if they were assigned randomly or concentrated in lower-performing, poorer schools.

Non-traditional licenses

By Alice Warchol and Philip Walzer The Virginian-Pilot

In the scramble to hire teachers, school divisions in Virginia are now employing educators who do not have traditional teaching licenses.

Some of them have yet to take or pass the PRAXIS I - a national teaching exam. Others have not completed college-level coursework required by teacher-preparation programs. But they are allowed to teach for three years with varying types of alternative licenses.

While administrators defend their hiring practices, a slew of elected officials and teaching professionals say these temporarily licensed teachers should not be in the classroom.

Investigating dispute

That was one of the disputes we set out to answer in our story. We also wanted to know how many teachers being hired had some type of alternative license. Where did they work? Were they assigned randomly, as administrators claimed, or were they mostly working in poor schools or schools with low test scores?

To begin, we started with the Virginia Department of Education. We learned that there are two types of alternative licenses: provisional and conditional. We also found out that half of the new licenses issued last year were alternative ones. (We wanted to gauge if this was a growing trend, but the state just started tracking this information.)

Our next step was to ask each of the five local school systems that we cover how many provisional and conditional teachers they employ, and more importantly, where they worked. We used Virginia's Freedom of Information Act to request the numbers. We encountered little resistance. We were not charged.

Organizing data

To organize our data, we used Excel and created one worksheet for each city. Then, we downloaded from the Department of Education's Web site school enrollment numbers and free- and reduced-price lunch data a national indicator of poverty. We were lucky because the state posts its enrollment and lunch program information in Excel.

For every school in each city, we had columns for enrollment, percent of children eligible for free- and reduced-price lunch and number of alternatively licensed teachers. Then we added another column for the test score information. That came from our colleague Matthew Bowers who had created an Excel spreadsheet when the state's test results were announced last year. Each school in each city was assigned a number between 1 and 4. The number 1 meant the school was fully accredited by the state; a 4 indicated the lowest rating: accredited with warning.

To determine whether one school had more alternatively licensed teachers than another, we inserted a column that gave us the rate of teachers per 1,000 students for each school. (We divided each school's number of alternatively-licensed teachers by its student enrollment and then multiplied that result by 1,000.) At this point, we sorted each worksheet by the rate per 1,000. That showed us the top 10 schools in each city with the largest number of alternative teachers taking into account their student enrollment.

Top 10 list

All of the hiring folks we interviewed said they placed alternatively licensed teachers wherever needed. True, we found poor and wealthier schools among our list of top 10. But when we looked at how well those schools did on the state's exams, our analysis showed that most of the schools did not meet Virginia's standards.

When we published our story, we arranged to post part of our database online. Parents could log on to our Web site and search by city for their child's school. The online database shows enrollment, number of alternatively licensed teachers and the rate per school. We e-mailed the file to our online news coordinator, Kerry Sipe, a couple of days in advance to publication. He arranged to have it posted on the Web site.

Our advice to fellow reporters is to repeatedly proof your work. Have someone else look over your computations.

For the print version of our story, we ran a large graphic listing the same info for the top 10 schools.

Numbers give structure

The numbers gave us a structure for the story. But most of our reporting focused on why teachers weren't qualified for a full license and whether that was hurting kids. We found alternatively licensed teachers ready to defend themselves. We showed what it's like to be in their classroom. We also talked to education professionals who worry about the quality of education someone can bring to the classroom when they haven't student-taught or can't pass the PRAXIS I - a basic-skills test.

Our last step was to think like parents. Would a school tell them if their child's teacher had a temporary license? The conflicting yes and no answers we received from school divisions only made our story better.

Although the project was a lot of work and took several weeks to complete - we did it in between covering our beats - it was fairly simple as far as CAR endeavors can go. Our advice to fellow reporters is to repeatedly proof your work. Have someone else look over your computations. And when you're sending Freedom of Information Act requests to several school systems, it's imperative to ask for the same information.

Alice Warchol can be reached by e-mail at awarchol@pilotonline.com. Philip Walzer can be reached by e-mail at walzer@pilotonline.com