william farren's Profile

Certification consultants are not available for individual consultations

Note:  The interstate agreement does not exempt candidates from degree, testing and/or experiential requirements applicable to the requested certification endorsement.

Effective July 1, 2009, out-of-state teachers and administrators may be exempt from Board approved assessment requirements, including Praxis I PPST, Praxis II subject knowledge tests, Connecticut Foundations of Reading Test and/or ACTFL OPI and WPT, if they meet the following criteria:

No one knows beforehand what makes a high-performing financial adviser different from a low-performing one, so the field throws the door wide open.

Some of these things matter a little, or somewhat, some (like having a Masters’ degree) appear not to matter at all.

The lack of definitive results has left plenty of room for people of different camps to comfortably keep various ideological arguments going ad infinitum, with little danger of actually resolving the issue and thus having to find something else to do.

As near as anyone can tell, there is no way to figure out ahead of time who is going to be an effective teacher and who is not via traditional training and filtering processes. The best way–arguably, the only way–to figure who is an effective teacher turns out to be letting people teach and seeing if they’re effective.

The logic of this quickly leads to a very different approach toward teacher quality–not train and certify, but, as Glaeser writes, attract and select.

A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom.

A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom.

But perhaps the most significant trend in education technology, Evans said, is the emergence of the student as a "free agent learner": Students want more control over their own learning experiences through technology and want to define their own educational destinies and determine the direction of their learning.

"This free agent learner is one that is technology-enabled, technology-empowered, and technology-engaged to be ... an important part of driving their own educational destiny. To some extent they feel ... it's a responsibility. They also feel it's a right to be able to do that. So technology has enabled this free agent learner. We have the opportunity in education to make sure they're on the right track and to be supportive of their learning experiences."

“Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions.

Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.”