Former U. S. Department of Education official: Missouri doesn't care about the quality of its teachers- any warm body will do

Earlier this week citing the pandemic as a reason, the Missouri Board of Education lowered the standards required for people to serve as substitute teachers in Missouri classrooms.

While it is true that schools may run into problems with teachers being absent due to the coronavirus, this change was something that had been in the works for quite some time.

Noted education author and blogger Diane Ravitch, who was Assistant Secretary of Education during the George H. W. Bush Administration criticized the decision in her blog this morning.

Ravitch, author of the best-selling books  The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education and Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and Its Danger to America’s Public School, quoted from a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article that noted the changes, which lowered the 60 hours of college credit requirement for substitute teaching to only requiring a high school diploma and undergoing a 20-hour online training course and offered the following comment:

In other words, Missouri doesn’t care about the quality of teachers. Any warm body will do.