Last week, the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB) adopted rule for the new, four-tiered teacher licensure system. This is a huge milestone in what has been a long and sometimes contentious rulemaking process. In particular, the past couple of months have been very busy for PELSB, as they have had to make rule changes to address defects found by the Administrative Law Judge (ALJ).
Over the past two months, PELSB has had to make changes and resubmit their rule draft to the Chief ALJ several times. A detailed timeline is below:
August 2018
September 2018
October 2018
Prior to adoption and in response to defects found by the Chief ALJ, PELSB made two changes with regard to “Acceptable Applicants” and “Professional license from another state.”
Acceptable Applicants: In statute, an individual can receive a Tier 1 license and renewals if the hiring district or charter school “was unable to hire an acceptable teacher with a Tier 2, 3, or 4 license.” In order to clarify what “acceptable teacher” means, PELSB’s June 2018 rule draft indicated that PELSB would have “sole discretion” to deny a Tier 1 licensure request.
In the August 16 report, however, the ALJ noted PELSB’s proposal to review Tier 1 applications on a “case-by-case basis” did not provide a clear standard. In her report, the ALJ provided a number of recommendations for how PELSB could rectify this defect. She concluded that whatever PELSB decided to do, they must make it clear what constitutes an unacceptable higher-tiered candidate. In the end, PELSB created and adopted a list of five items that would that would deem a Tier 2, Tier 3, or Tier 4 applicant “unacceptable”.
Professional license from another state: In the August 16 report, the ALJ found PELSB’s proposed definition for “professional license” for individuals from another state to be defective for the following reasons:
To address the defects, PELSB ended up using the definition the Chief ALJ recommended in her September 17 report:
“‘Professional license from another state’ means a professional teaching license issued by the responsible state agency of another state and required by law of that state for an individual to teach in a public school, but does not include an emergency, temporary, or substitute teaching license.”
Unless Governor Dayton vetoes the adopted tiered licensure rule, they will be effective in late October or early November. Why the delay? Even though PELSB adopted rule, there are several steps that have to occur before the adopted rules become official:
No, not even close. In fact, for 2019, PELSB has set a robust rulemaking schedule. Specifically, PELSB plans to do rulemaking for:
Education Evolving will continue follow and report on PELSB rulemaking, particularly as it relates to teacher preparation programs and the Standards of Effective Practice.
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