Emergency Licenses Likely to Hit Record

Driving to cut class size, California elementary schools in the past year have hired an unprecedented number of teachers like Lisa Myers: bright, eager and uncredentialed.

Myers is winning praise in her rookie year at Garfield Elementary School in Santa Ana as a promising young teacher of 20 first- and second-grade students who mainly speak Spanish.

Yet she and thousands like her across the state lacked formal training when hired--and now are scrambling to secure teaching licenses in their spare time.

State officials estimate that a record 11,000 emergency permits for multiple-subject teaching--the kind used in elementary schools--will have been issued by the end of the school year June 30. That’s about 75% more than the previous year’s total of 6,200.

What’s more, the number is expected to grow in the next year as demand for new teachers continues to exceed supply.

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Emergency permits are given to people who hold a bachelor’s degree--with course work in key subject areas--and have passed a basic skills exam but have not finished a required year of postgraduate studies and training. The state also can lower even the emergency standards, and several hundred elementary schoolteachers have been granted such waivers this year.

While emergency teachers are typically the greenest, educators say many rejuvenate schools with enthusiasm and fresh ideas. But historically they have tended to leave the profession at a faster rate than fully trained teachers. And many wind up with difficult assignments in bilingual and special education programs, where the greatest teacher shortages lie.

A large proportion of this year’s emergency teachers appear to be employed in urban districts already faced with daunting challenges, according to education analysts and figures from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

From July through April, the commission had issued 3,165 multiple-subject emergency permits to teachers in the giant Los Angeles Unified School District, up from 1,718 in the full 1995-96 school year. Those figures do not include beginning teachers in the district’s well-known internship program.

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In the Santa Ana Unified School District, which hired Myers last summer, 152 emergency permits were issued to teachers from July through April. That is the highest number in Orange County and up from 88 the entire year before. School districts in Orange, Garden Grove, Anaheim, Long Beach and Montebello also have posted sharp increases in uncredentialed staff, while districts in better-off suburbs have gobbled up the fully licensed teachers.

“The problem is that those teachers who do get appropriate training and certification tend to go to school districts where they think their work will be more manageable,” said UCLA education professor Jeannie Oakes. “That leaves urban school districts--with language-minority kids, children of color, immigrant kids--bearing the brunt of the teacher shortage. We think it’s a horrendous problem.”

Emergency permits have surged even though California universities are accelerating their output of certified teachers. This school year, the state expects to credential about 9,600 elementary-level teachers, up from 8,100 the year before. But enrollment growth and the state’s new demand for primary grade teachers have eaten up the gains.

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The influx of teachers who lack full certification has forced many districts to launch in-house teacher academies and prompted calls for more state investment in training.

The credentialing commission’s director of teacher certification, Bob Salley, said there are no figures on how many emergency permit teachers were put into the classes limited to 20 students under the state’s widely promoted program to reduce the size of classes from kindergarten through third grade.

But some lawmakers and analysts say the $1-billion initiative and other efforts to improve student performance in reading and mathematics could be undermined unless the state bolsters the quality of its teaching force.

“Simply reducing class size is only part of the equation,” said Assemblyman Jack Scott (D-Pasadena). “Frankly, I would rather have my child in a classroom of 30 students with an excellent teacher than a classroom of 20 students with a poor teacher.”

Scott is sponsoring a bill (AB 351) backed by the California Teachers Assn. and the credentialing commission that would allot $10 million in the next year for formal academic training and mentorship of emergency-permit teachers. Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed $10 million for another university program that monitors beginning teachers.

Local school officials said that they have taken exhaustive measures to support new teachers--and that they are pleased with the results. Joe Tafoya, a deputy superintendent of Santa Ana Unified, said only five or six first-year teachers won’t be asked back.

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Myers, 27, was out of work and rethinking her career options in her home state of Pennsylvania when a friend called last summer with news of openings in Santa Ana schools. Myers’ fluent Spanish and experience with a youth ministry and a boys and girls club helped her land a job despite her lack of classroom training.

The district gave Myers and other new teachers a one-week seminar last fall on strategies for time management, classroom discipline and lesson plans. Veteran teachers also have given advice freely, and Myers takes evening courses at National University for her credential. “It’s been a lot more enjoyable than I expected,” she said of her first year. “I didn’t think I’d be able to do it. But I love it.’

In the Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park, nine teachers were hired at the Logan Street School, including an artist, a hospital administrator, a trilingual office worker who majored in political science and several others fresh out of college. Almost all lacked a credential but are getting training, through the district or universities, to earn a license within a year or two.

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Melissa Moore, 29, was an administrator in a Westside psychiatric rehabilitation hospital when she decided to try her hand at something she had long wanted to do--work with children instead of adults. “I love working with first-graders,” she said. “I love teaching them to read.”

But it hasn’t been easy. After teaching all day, she works on homework assignments for her credentialing program. It requires her to attend class most weekends and for three hours one night during the week.

Most education leaders agree that California must step up its production of fully trained teachers. Last fall, the California State University’s Institute for Education Reform issued a study that found that many districts have come to rely on emergency permit teachers year after year.

“As long as emergency teachers occupy California classrooms, the rhetoric of strengthening academic standards will remain hollow and hypocritical,” former state Sen. Gary K. Hart, director of the institute, wrote in the report.

University leaders say they are doing all they can to raise the output, and many are forming partnerships with districts to increase oversight of novice teachers. In the meantime, emergency teachers will continue to be in heavy demand, especially in elementary schools.

“Our feeling is that [all teachers] should be fully credentialed, just like fully certified doctors, fully certified nurses and fully certified lawyers,” said David Lebow, a longtime high school history teacher in Montebello who tracks the issue for the California Teachers Assn.

“The problem is, if you take all the emergency permits out of California schools, who’s in those classrooms? Who’s there? You can’t open the doors to the schoolrooms with no one there.”

Times education writer Richard Lee Colvin contributed to this story.