There is a movement afoot to make it easier for people to be hired to teach in Minnesota schools. These new hires may have the legal right to stand in front of a classroom and offer information to students, but that doesn't mean they're prepared for the challenges that lie ahead.

It takes years of experience and continuous education before teachers achieve proficiency. Each student brings specific needs to the classroom, just as each subject requires specific knowledge from the teacher. Teaching is a difficult job – more difficult than is widely realized.

That's why it is important to make it clear that easing up on the requirements necessary to become a teacher is not the way to advance education in Minnesota. Leaders at the state's education colleges say that while it's good to reach out to a wide range of prospective teachers and target teaching candidates to specific subject areas, it is counterintuitive to think that simply a bachelor's degree and a passing grade on the licensure test qualifies someone as a good teacher.

A question of how
"We all want the same thing, and that's to attract the best candidates and put the best teachers in the classroom," said Bruce Munson, professor of education at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and president of the Minnesota Association for Colleges of Teacher Education. "It's how we get there that becomes the issue."

President Barack Obama and Gov. Tim Pawlenty prefer the easy path to teacher licensure. They say a teacher is qualified after gaining an undergraduate degree, going through a short period of training, and passing the teacher licensure test.

They point to Teach for America, a program that takes new college graduates, trains them with 200 hours of education over five weeks, and after they pass the teacher licensure exam puts them in an inner-city classroom while they continue to attend night school. Teach for America has been hailed as a success in some of the United State's most underperforming education systems, such as those in New York City, Washington and Chicago. The organization offered its services to the Minneapolis and Brooklyn Center school districts last year and has had Teach for America participants in classes since the beginning of the school year.

In addition to Teach for America, the Bush Foundation in St. Paul is in the process of spending $40 million over 10 years to recruit, train and retain 25,000 new teachers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. The foundation says increased teacher retirements over the next 10 years will require hundreds of new teachers, and this provides an opportunity for colleges of education to revamp how they educate each generation of teachers.

Recruiting early
The Bush Foundation is building a program in which colleges of education will begin recruiting potential teachers in high school. In the first years of college, the program has students spend less time in college classes and more in K-12 classrooms, and then requires colleges to "guarantee" the quality of their students to the districts that hire them.

Both Teach for America and the Bush Foundation proposals have the seeds of success in them, but they both try to quantify qualities in teachers that are very difficult to measure.

"While we want to attract the 'Best and the Brightest' to teaching (a la Teach for America), there is a whole other range of people we want to attract to teaching," said Misty Sato, assistant professor of teacher development at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. "We want teachers who care about children. That's a crucial quality but it's hard to measure. Another important quality is the desire to fix inequality. That's a hard quality to measure."

'Enormous growth' in first year of teaching
Glen Palm, the interim dean at the College of Education at St. Cloud State University, likes the Bush Foundation's goal of continuing to educate first-year college graduates in the field. "Developmentally, the first year of teaching brings enormous growth, and we should be there to help the new teacher to grow," he said. "For example, working with parents. I'm not sure a junior in college really understands what that entails, but after a year or two in the field, that's a great time to revisit that subject."

But education officials are also confused. "These are two very different messages, and they're both coming from St. Paul," Palm said. While the Bush Foundation's plan would require more input from the colleges, the Teach for America model requires virtually none.

"There needs to be different pathways to teaching, but you can't say someone's got a bachelor's degree in science and they're ready to go into the classroom," Palm said. "Some teaching skills require more advanced training than others, but the messages from St. Paul don't differentiate between them."

Teaching is a profession. It requires professionals. These professionals require training both before and during their teaching careers. Attempts to lessen that training or that professionalism are counterproductive and don't serve the very people teachers most hope to help – the students.

John Fitzgerald is an education policy fellow at Minnesota 2020, a progressive, nonpartisan think tank based in St. Paul. This article originally appeared on the organization's website.