PETITION CLOSED

  • The time period for signing this petition has ended.
Act now: Get great teachers into Minnesota classrooms
  1. Signatures
    1,240 out of 1,500
    Petitioning
    1. The MN State House
  2. Created By
    50CAN
About this Petition Petition Letter Petition Updates

Our struggling schools need as many great teachers as they can get, but Minnesota law puts up major barriers to bringing in teachers through alternative routes.

For example, if mid-career professionals or young people who majored in math or English instead of teaching want to teach public school in Minnesota, they have to go back to college before they can set foot in the door of one of our struggling schools!

Removing roadblocks for qualified teachers is a necessary step toward improving the quality of Minnesota public schools. Fortunately, our state legislature is about to vote on a bill that will do just that.

HF63, a bill that would allow great teachers to get certified and into our neediest classrooms as soon as possible, could come up for a vote as soon as this week.

Act now and urge your representative to support HF63 and removing roadblocks for qualified teachers.

 

 

Why People Are Signing
Recent Signatures

Support HF63 and Get Great Teachers into MN Classrooms

Greetings,

I’m writing as an advocate for education reform in Minnesota public schools to ask you to vote YES on HF63, a bill that removes roadblocks to getting great teachers into our classrooms by opening alternative paths to teacher certification.

The first place to start in transforming our public schools is the classroom. A great teacher can improve her students’ achievement by as much as two or three years in one year of teaching, while students stuck with a lower-performing teacher can lose ground, placing them further behind the next year.

Great teachers are especially needed to close our achievement gaps—some of the largest in the country. At a time when the demographics of our state are rapidly changing, our low-income students, our immigrant students and our students of color are far behind, and we are doing very little about it.

Our struggling schools need as many great teachers as they can get, but Minnesota law puts up major barriers to bringing in teachers through alternative routes. For example, if mid-career professionals or young people who majored in math or English instead of teaching want to teach public school in Minnesota, they have to go back to college.

To teach middle or high school math in Minnesota, a teacher must have the coursework equivalent of a minor in mathematics—and there is no way to test out of those coursework requirements.

If an economics or political science major from one of the country’s best universities wanted to teach seventh grade math in Minnesota, she would have to pay to take high-level math classes before setting foot in the door of a struggling school.

Right now there’s a bill under consideration in the Senate that would open up new routes for teacher certification, allowing great teachers to get into our neediest classrooms as soon as possible.

I urge you to support alternate routes for teacher certification by voting for HF63 and encouraging your colleagues to do the same.

Thank you for backing legislation that will fight Minnesota’s achievement gap by removing roadblocks to getting great teachers into our classrooms.

Sincerely,

[Your name]

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