In a different life, Charlie Kong worked on ways to up the performance of nuclear missiles. Now he is trying to raise the math scores of high school students in a middle-class neighborhood.
If you ask him, being a teacher may be more stressful than his old job.
"Being an engineer, I guess, was more relaxed than being a teacher," he says. "Being a teacher, you have to keep up with all the paperwork, and it wasn't that bad when I was an engineer. We had plenty of time to get projects done."
Kong became a math teacher through an alternative certification program.
Such programs allow people with different educational backgrounds to become teachers without having to go through a traditional teaching education.
Under the traditional approach, aspiring teachers must complete an approved educational program before they can walk into a classroom.
Alternative certification, on the other hand, allows aspiring teachers to learn on the job. They teach during the day, then take classes in their spare time to earn their teaching stripes.
Entrance requirements vary, but generally include a bachelor's degree.
Consider California. Candidates must have a bachelor's degree and pass a general as well as a subject-specific competency test.
And depending on the program they choose, they may have to attend up to 500 hours of professional development classes, says Michael McKibbin. He is the administrator for teacher development for the California Commission on Teacher Credentialling.
Proponents of alternative certification say it helps relieve critical teacher shortages in the natural sciences and math.
It also increases the diversity and quality of the teaching force, they say. Graduates of alternative teaching programs are more likely to be of color and tend to have more life experience.
"Because of age, because of prior experiences, they bring some maturity to the classroom that maybe a 21-year-old would not bring," says Anita Davis. She is the chair of the education department at Converse College in South Carolina.
Davis is an expert on alternative certification and the former head of the alternative teacher certification program at her college.
Interest in alternative certification is certainly significant.
Forty-one states plus the District of Columbia offered some type of alternative teacher certification program in 1998. That's according to the National Center for Education Information (NCEI), a private research organization.
California alone has 75 different programs, spending some $30 million on alternative certification in the fiscal year 2000-2001, says McKibbin.
So far, more than 125,000 people hold alternative teacher certification in the U.S., according to the NCEI. This number may soon go up dramatically. That's because experts predict a teacher shortage.
Many current teachers are close to retirement, and the pool of replacements is shallow. Forty per cent of graduates from traditional teacher programs -- the main source of new teachers -- do not go into teaching, at least not right away, the NCEI says.
And of those who do, about a third stop teaching within the first five years because of poor pay and working conditions.
The teacher shortage will have a distinct geography, too.
Most graduates of traditional educational programs are young white females. They generally do not want to teach where the demand for teachers is the greatest -- inner cities and outlying rural areas. So areas that need teachers the most will also suffer the most if nothing is done.
Alternative certification may remedy many of these problems. And it may well be the only option unless teaching environments change significantly.
"Until we raise the salaries, we are going to find people are not going to choose a major...or a minor in education," says Davis. "Until we make working conditions more appealing, I think we are going to need to go with alternative certification."
But even supporters of alternative certification admit that it is not perfect.
In her congressional testimony, Feistritzer notes that not all programs that some states call "alternative teacher certification routes" meet the demands of academic rigor.
It is also hard to say how effective alternative certification programs really are.
McKibbin says a 1987 study shows that teachers who went through an alternative certification program compared well with teachers who went through a traditional program. "These kind of folks fared very well against others," he says.
The NCEI confirms this, putting California among the three states with exemplary alternative teacher certification programs. But even McKibbin admits that the 1987 survey may not have been as comprehensive as he would have liked.
Canada faces a teacher shortage, too.
The number of teachers has declined steadily, from 284,000 in 1991-1992 to 271,000 in 1999-2000, according to the Canadian Teachers' Federation (CTF). It gets worse. About 45 per cent of teachers may retire by 2008, leaving Canada short of teachers as classrooms grow larger.
Helen Raham is the executive director of the Society for the Advancement of Excellence in Education, a nonprofit research group.
She says that in view of the coming teacher shortage, alternative certification may be worth some serious consideration.
"What is important is the quality of student learning...and alternative methods of attracting and paying teachers are certainly opportunities that we should look at in a time of pending teacher shortage," she says.
In fact, Canada has a history of bringing outsiders into classrooms to teach.
During the 1960s, Canada faced a shortage of trades teachers. So with financial help from the federal government, the provinces turned thousands of mechanics and carpenters into shop teachers. But this foray into alternative certification was small in scale and scope.
Any future changes to teacher certification are likely to be significant. And they may run into several obstacles.
The Canadian Teachers' Federation, a national lobby group for teachers, is not exactly embracing the idea.
Julius Buski is the secretary-general of the Canadian Teachers' Federation. He says what worries him the most is the assumption that because somebody knows something about a field, that person is automatically qualified to teach it.
"Teaching is very much a profession that relies on a background of knowledge and you have to pick some of it up through some teacher preparation courses before anybody should be let loose on kids," he says.
Politics, of course, simmer right beneath the question of who gets to teach our children and who doesn't. Although it is far too early to tell, alternative teacher certification may undermine the lobbying and bargaining power of the teachers' unions.
Funding may be another obstacle. Turning engineers into science and math teachers takes money and extra spots at universities. But Canada is also facing a shortage of qualified education instructors, says Buski. In other words, there are not enough teachers to teach teachers.
As for Kong, he is more than happy with his new career. "One of the things I tell other teachers is that I come to work smiling and I go home smiling. I'm enjoying every minute of it, and I hope I can really help these kids who need help."
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