Here's a scary thought

In a world where we are so worried about hiring "highly qualified" teachers that have such high accountability, we see something like this. Reading this article scares me.

In other words these students will be teachers with their own classroom, their own discipline system, their own grading system, their own set of class rules without ever having student taught or for that matter without being certified or graduated from a university. The competition for math teachers has become so tight that schools are jumping the gun and hiring these students before they even student teach. As a university we are forced to give student teaching credit for the first semester of full-time, paid teaching. Is this the wave of the future for those teaching majors that are in high demand? Will special education teachers and science teachers see the same recruiting pressure in the near future?

I don't think that I would have been able to teach in my own classroom without first done a semester of student teaching. I made so many mistakes, but I had a support system that was in place to help me improve and not just get down on myself. Even now, after five years of teaching, I am still learning so much. I get to see a lot more of education as the CFF coach for our district, so I am able to incorporate so many different methods of instruction into my own. But here, we are giving classrooms to young teachers that are only a few years older than their students without having given them their full and proper training!

I would hope that our district would not hire anyone without the proper preparation and credentials. At the same time, I can see how it could come to be, as there is a smaller and smaller pool of teachers out there, all competing for the the same jobs and different districts. How do we attract and retain the good ones?