With low teacher pay, large class sizes and low education funding, our state’s schools have faced a severe teacher shortage for years now.
So to fill classrooms, some schools in our state are turning to teachers who do not have full qualifications. That means the teacher doesn’t have a standards certificate that shows they have a bachelor’s degree, has completed the subject knowledge exams they’re required to, and they have at least 2 years’ experience teaching full-time in a classroom.
Ricardo Cano with The Arizona Republic did a first-of-its-kind analysis of 162 school districts in the state and found that of about 46,000 teachers in the state, 22 percent lacked full qualifications.
