If you were preparing to teach in a private institution, requirements would be far fewer. Private high schools are funded mostly by individuals who by and large hand over the responsibility of quality control to administrative leaders who hire based on a variety of measures. Until recently, these schools might only require that a student graduated with a major in the area he or she would be teaching, or in some related area; today, more and more private schools are interested in hiring teachers who have not only content-related education but a background in educational foundations and other areas taught in Colleges of Education.
On the other hand, public tax dollars fund public schools (and public universities), and the public thus demands and has a right to indirect oversight (through their representatives). Since State and federal representatives (even School Boards) have very little idea what goes on in the processes of teaching and learning, they look to Federal and State appointed boards to determine standards for teacher certification. The process of determining these standards is thus subject to both Federal and State politics (especially with Federal funding recently tied to the No Child Left Behind Act) and debates within the educational establishment over appropriate preparation. Nor is there even agreement among those agencies overseeing the process of producing teachers in Illinois over what attributes, backgrounds, and characteristics are necessary for all secondary education teachers.
In our place at NEIU, we have to answer State requirements, which might not exactly coincide with Federal requirements, which in turn might not include all that required by the North Central accrediting association. Ultimately, the requirements for future teachers in Secondary Education in English coming out of NEIU need to cover ALL of these various requirements.
More important than any of the above mess, a couple of years ago, representatives from all the departments from which your coursework is drawn at NEIU (English, Teacher Education, Reading, Linguistics) got together as a committee to discuss ways of satisfying new requirements for Secondary English Majors handed down by the accrediting powers that be. During that series of meetings, feedback from recent graduates of our programs was taken into account that seemed to indicate that even though our students had satisfied State and other requirements, they were still finding themselves, in their first years of teaching, not as well prepared as they could be in their breadth of literary knowledge. Teaching in Chicago area schools, for example, they were being asked to teach not only Shakespeare but James Weldon Johnson and Richard Wright; not only the ballads of New England but the corridos of the Southwest. These latter they had to learn on the run, even as they were being asked to include them in their courses.
Taking this sort of practical feedback and other considerations into account, the committee designed a new set of course requirements for the "content" side of the Secondary Education Major in English that does a more effective job of preparing students for their real tasks as they enter the teaching workforce. The result is a program which demands more work when you are student so you will be able to concentrate better on your work with your students when you become a teacher.
Yet still one might wonder: why are there so many requirements--so many roadblocks--in a program which prepares students for a job that doesn't pay as well as many, has less prestige, and demands more work (despite what everyone says about "getting summers off") than certainly any other job of equal pay--not to mention the enormous responsibility it involves, of preparing the next generation of junior high and high school students for life in the 21st century?
As that latter phrase suggests, it is PRECISELY the enormous responsibility teachers take on that make all the "requirements" so important. If suddenly every marketing professional in the United States were to disappear tomorrow, life would go on (it might even be better). If we lost our teachers--if there were no one to train our young people to think--to analyze--to read--to express themselves appropriately and clearly--where would we be?
The captious might say anyone could take up the slack; the idea here is that not just anyone can. Program "requirements" may change, and they may even derive from some sources that do not always have the best interests of teachers and teaching in mind, but ultimately, they will always mark the professional commitment SOME in our society have made to prepare not more factory workers, more business professionals, more democrats, more libertarians, but rather the best minds of the new generation.
page last updated 1/09/06