Driving to cut class size, California elementary schools in the past year have hired an unprecedented number of teachers like Lisa Myers: bright, eager and uncredentialed.
Myers is winning praise in her rookie year at Garfield Elementary School in Santa Ana as a promising young teacher of 20 first- and second-grade students who mainly speak Spanish.
Yet she and thousands like her across the state lacked formal training when hired--and now are scrambling to secure teaching licenses in their spare time.
State officials estimate that a record 11,000 emergency permits for multiple-subject teaching--the kind used in elementary schools--will have been issued by the end of the school year June 30. That's about 75% more than the previous year's total of 6,200.
What's more, the number is expected to grow in the next year as demand for new teachers continues to exceed supply.
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Emergency permits are given to people who hold a bachelor's degree--with course work in key subject areas--and have passed a basic skills exam but have not finished a required year of postgraduate studies and training. The state also can lower even the emergency standards, and several hundred elementary schoolteachers have been granted such waivers this year.
While emergency teachers are typically the greenest, educators say many rejuvenate schools with enthusiasm and fresh ideas. But historically they have tended to leave the profession at a faster rate than fully trained teachers. And many wind up with difficult assignments in bilingual and special education programs, where the greatest teacher shortages lie.
A large proportion of this year's emergency teachers appear to be employed in urban districts already faced with daunting challenges, according to education analysts and figures from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
From July through April, the commission had issued 3,165 multiple-subject emergency permits to teachers in the giant Los Angeles Unified School District, up from 1,718 in the full 1995-96 school year. Those figures do not include beginning teachers in the district's well-known internship program.
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In the Santa Ana Unified School District, which hired Myers last summer, 152 emergency permits were issued to teachers from July through April. That is the highest number in Orange County and up from 88 the entire year before. School districts in Orange, Garden Grove, Anaheim, Long Beach and Montebello also have posted sharp increases in uncredentialed staff, while districts in better-off suburbs have gobbled up the fully licensed teachers.
