Broken teacher certification

To the Editor;
Maine teacher certification is seriously flawed as Paul Stearns pointed out in his OpEd, and has been for years. Maine’s restrictive and simple-minded requirements are keeping the highly qualified individuals mentioned, as well as others, out of our schools that urgently
need the best teachers we can find.

I am also one of them. When I moved back to Maine, I found that I would be required to take at least a year’s worth of full-time “methods” courses plus supervised practice teaching to get a provisional social studies certificate. My prior qualifications didn’t count, those being chair of the history department and college counselor for five years at a boarding school, director of counseling and history teacher at another highly respected private school, dean of a Maine community college, head instructor for 125 Army Reserve instructors at West Point, Maine’s representative to the New England Board of Higher Education, and more. In addition, while chair of the education admissions committee at Boston University, I had to decide on the fitness of many Maine applicants to enroll in our School of Education.

Let’s hope, as Stearns urges, that we finally get an education commissioner and State Board of Education that knows anything about how to save Maine’s quality of education, and that Gov. Janet Mills is listening.

Peter Duston
Cherryfield