Alaska teachers who want to supervise student teachers this coming school year must have taught for at least one year in their school districts, and three years total, and meet or exceed state content and performance standards, according to regulation changes adopted by the Alaska State Board of Education and Early Development.
The changes go into effect Saturday and strengthen the current student teaching regulations that simply require teachers to be certified. However, education officials say most school districts and universities already require teachers to have some level of experience before accepting student teachers, despite the state not explicitly codifying it.
"It hasn't generated much interest on our end because everything they're proposing we're pretty much doing already," said Todd Hess, chief human resources officer at the Anchorage School District. He said he couldn't recall a student teacher ever being paired with a teacher who had less than one year of experience in the district.
But the board did dial back one proposed regulation change that would have required teachers to have tenure -- defined by the state as three or more years in a school district -- before supervising a student teacher.
"It went from being just certification to being tenured and then -- because of public comment -- we changed it to reflect something that was more reasonable for all of our districts in the state," said Sondra Meredith, administrator of teacher education and certification for the education department.
The constant churn of teachers through rural Alaska schools has long vexed the state's education system. Research has shown that the rate of teacher turnover in rural districts has long exceeded that of urban districts. That turnover affects which schools have tenured teachers and could have impacted, if the education board had adopted the change, which schools could accept student teachers.
Carol Barnhardt, chair of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Department of Elementary Teacher Education, opposed the tenure requirement in the written public comment she submitted to the state.
"This proposal is a very serious concern for us in the UAF School of Education because we place many student teachers/interns in small rural districts where the best mentor teacher is not always a teacher who is tenured in Alaska," Barnhardt said in her comment.
David Piazza, superintendent of the Southwest Region School District, said in his public comment that changing the language to add tenure as a requirement would "severely cut back" on the number of placements his school district could provide.
"If the district, school principal, cooperating teacher and university supervisors are all OK with a placement, 'tenure' should have no place in this decision," Piazza said in his comment.
In response to public feedback, education officials softened the requirement for tenure to at least three years' teaching experience total -- plus at least one year's experience in the district, Meredith said.
Last school year, there were 271 student teachers in Alaska public schools and 251 the year before that, according to Meredith.
Deborah Lo, dean of University of Alaska Southeast's School of Education, said the adopted changes would likely not have a large impact on the state's student teaching system, though they could affect small rural schools that employ only one or two teachers and experience turnover. Though, she said, "in that case, we wouldn't put a teacher there anyway."
Lo said the regulation changes may have been influenced by a nationwide report on teacher policy released last year by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group that advocates for reforms it believes will improve the teaching profession. In that report, the average grade across the country was a C minus. Alaska averaged a D overall for areas that included delivering well-prepared teachers and identifying and retaining effective teachers. The state got its lowest grade, an F, in the "delivering well-prepared teachers" category.
"If it's not in the regulations, it's assumed it's not done," Lo said. "I think it was an oversight that they weren't there. So they're catching up."