Jack Jennings: Intention vs. Reality

There's a neat article in the September 12th edition of Education Week on the practice of having substitute teachers fill-in when postings go unfilled; towards the end it gets into the overall issue of substitute teacher quality. Jack Jennings is president of the Center on Education Policy, an advocacy group based in Washington, DC, and he has an interesting quote:

"There should be at least an investigation of this issue as a problem," he said. "We need to look at how many substitute teachers there are, how long they stay in schools, and are they on the way to fulfilling requirements for certification."

It's one of those things. Here in Washington you have to be a certificated teacher in order to substitute, but to sub as a parapro you basically need to have a pulse and no felony convictions. In other places a high school diploma is all you need to be a teacher sub, and that's the problem that I think Mr. Jennings is speaking to here.

The question is, what do you do?

Consider, for example, your average urban district that starts with substitutes in many classrooms. Should they start with the sub teacher, and thus lower class size, or with every child in contact with a credentialed teacher, thereby driving class size up?

The article also gets into the problem of getting highly qualified substitutes in rural districts. Consider a place like Republic, or Washougal--small towns far away from any major population center. If they have a need for a physics teacher, should they have the class taught by the biology teacher who doesn't meet the HQ requirements, or by a substitute with no science background, or not offer the class at all?

I'm with Mr. Jennings in that there is a problem here, one that we're only in the nascent stages of dealing with, but is there a workable, equitable solution possible?

UPDATE: The Substitute Teaching Institute at Utah State University is a great resource for anyone interested in the issue.