Reinventing the Wheel in CCSD

In Sunday's installment of the P&C's series on literacy in our schools, it becomes painfully obvious what's wrong locally (and state-wide) with our schools and our institutions that grant degrees in education: they're just discovering practices used for decades in other states.

In Working Together, an article on placement of teaching assistants in classrooms, the reader learns that "First-grade classrooms typically don't have teaching assistants." And that "The district set aside about $350,000 in federal stimulus money for the two-year program, but that money runs out at the end of the next fiscal year."

"Through the Literacy Intern Project, the district covers most of the tuition and fees for graduate students to earn a master's degree in teaching as well as their salaries to work as teaching assistants. Afterward, participants commit to teaching in a high-poverty district school for three years."

Perhaps these students need a master's degree because they have no undergraduate degree in teaching. Otherwise, the qualifications ought to be described as overkill. A teacher needs a graduate degree in teaching to teach reading? No.

By my count Charleston County has at least three large educational institutions granting undergraduate degrees in education. Why has not each of them had an ongoing relationship with CCSD in which students who plan to become teachers are in the classroom from their very first year of study, building up to being teaching assistants as part of getting their teaching credentials?

Talk about killing two birds with one stone! Too many discover during their first year of teaching that they can't handle the classroom and never return to teaching. What a waste of their time and everyone else's.

We don't need federal stimulus money to carry out such a program.