What the BTSA?

BTSA is a four-letter word.

Okay — it's really a four-letter acronym, standing for Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment Induction Program. Created in 1998, it is a two-year program where new teachers — ones who already have earned their credential — must provide documentation of their teaching practices, receive guidance from a mentor ("support provider") and overall stay on track. In the words of the state, BTSA "provides formative assessment, individualized support and advanced content for newly-credentialed, beginning teachers."

Although teachers per No Child Left Behind must already have their preliminary credential or be in process for it, BTSA is a requirement in order for teachers to "clear" their credential and teach in public schools. According to the Department of Education, induction programs "may be offered by school districts, county offices of education, and/or institutions of higher education." The word "induction" makes it sound like a cult, which is not too far from what the State of California appears to be attempting.

Hmmm...let's go with that for a minute. Here's what the wonderful Department of Education in California has its newly minted educators do:

• Requires teachers to attend meetings when they are already exhausted from an eight-hour day. Most teachers work from 7:30-4:00 with only a 35 minute lunch, and most are already sleep deprived from grading papers; keeping exhausted people awake and then repeating things over and over to them is a favorite tactic of religious cults.
  
• Forces teachers to attend two-hour lectures by administrators spoken in educationese, rendering most of it meaningless. (Please note also that most of these administrators haven't been in front of a classroom in 10+ years.) Again, using special words and catchphrases to create a sense of community is another useful cult strategy.
  
• Construct a complicated trilogy of pathways inductees must follow in order to achieve "enlightenment" (i.e. their clear credential).
• Keep changing the rules every year so that it is impossible for one set of teachers to learn from another — or to form alliances which might resist cult leaders.
  
• Give teachers "support providers" who, for the most part, provide absolutely no support whatsoever and, in fact, may even make things tougher on the inductees — for example, delaying providing them with necessary paperwork, or failing to check in on them for months at a time.
  
• Pile this additional, required work on top of teachers in their first few years of teaching, when their thermostat is already set on "overwhelm."
• Make teachers who have already completed THREE YEARS of post-baccalaureate work to earn their preliminary credential write THE EXACT SAME KINDS OF LESSON PLANS and assorted garbage that they thought they had just finished, thereby making us wonder why in the world we shelled out $12,000 to $24,000 for our teaching credential — and putting us in a state of emotional confusion (again, very handy for cult leaders.)
• Finally — the whole concept of "clearing" a credential smacks of a certain semi-religious organization that has its inductees pay oodles of cash in order to become "clear."
  

While I am not seriously accusing Jack O'Connell et al of formal religious indoctrination, there are some striking similarities here that only go to prove the point that BTSA is a mess, a fraud, and a complete waste of time and resources.

If I sound immensely aggravated, it is nothing compared to the enormous frustration felt by incoming teachers as a whole with this Orwellian ordeal. And if you wonder why you as a reader/taxpayer should be equally frustrated and outraged by all this, I will give it to you plainly: this is where your tax dollars are going — to pay to train teachers a second time for something for which we have already been fully trained.

And the pundits wonder why there's no money for our schools...