Why judge by grades?

What makes a teacher great? We could discuss that question for days.

Or the even tougher question: How do we get our hands on enough excellent teachers to put one in every Iowa classroom?

Can we do it by limiting access to teacher prep programs to students who have at least a B average?

Probably not.

So what's the idea doing in Gov. Terry Branstad's $25 million education reform plan, intended to drag our K-12 schools into the information age?

It's one of the odd bean-counting ideas strewn in among the governor's forward-thinking reform ideas like competency-based promotion.

And as a House subcommittee continues to comb through the plan's details, there has been a lot of head scratching over those elements that seem to reach back 100 years for ideas about how to transform our schools.

Even the governor's proposal to open alternative pathways for professionals who want to become teachers - a fantastic idea, if you ask me - includes that 3.0 GPA requirement.

So if I'm a successful midcareer chemist and I want to teach Iowa 10th-graders about the mysteries of the Periodic Table, the department of ed is going to dust off my college transcripts to see if I'm up to snuff? It makes no sense.

And what does that mean for students who might have taken a more wandering path to their educational calling? Surely they could have valuable experience to share with Iowa's kids.

But what's even more troubling is how the proposal doesn't seem to fit into any overarching plan or reform philosophy.

Instead, it appears to be a simplistic solution floated in an attempt to address a very complex problem: How to identify and recruit truly excellent teachers.

The thinking is backward - as if a lack of strict GPA requirements is what's been preventing brilliant would-be teachers from flooding state colleges of ed. As if we can fix the problem simply by raising one arbitrary bar.

As Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal has pointed out, the governor has brought the 3.0 requirement to the table even as state education chief Jason Glass makes his case for a waiver from federal No Child Left Behind requirements.

Iowa's waiver application isn't yet public, but the early word is that Glass will argue strict test-score standards aren't an accurate reflection of what's happening in our schools, or what our kids are learning.

It's a good argument, one that will make sense to a lot of people.

So why doesn't it apply to teachers?

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net