As US education gains momentum towards getting young people back into classrooms in-person, we note that districts at least, are really prioritizing learning recovery (for lack of a better term) right now. Although it’s encouraging to see things heading in the right direction, there's still a lot of unknowns.

As you know, Massachusetts' teachers holding a Provisional license* are expected to advance to an Initial license during their fourth or fifth year of teaching. The traditional route to licensure (Route 1) requires grad school, intensive study and student-teaching scenarios. For some people, like Katherine Flynn, this felt like a ‘step back’. An experienced Special Educational Needs teacher, just three classes away from her Masters in teaching, Katherine started to research alternative ways to achieve licensure – quickly:

"What you get for your money with Class Measures is worth way more than anything you could get at grad school." 

Before his move to Massachusetts, Stephen Pettit had been a teacher for a long time. His route to teaching was a more unusual one. Despite having always wanted to teach, Stephen graduated from his undergraduate degree in the early 1970s and was advised not to go into teaching, because at that time there was a glut of teachers and no one was hiring. So he began a very successful career in the steel industry, working his way up over the next 30 years: