About
- More teachers are expected to retire between 2010 and 2020 than any decade of the past sixty years.
- 270,000 K-12 teachers must be hired this year simply to replace those who have retired or left the profession.
- Between 2.9 and 5.1 million new teachers will be hired between now and 2020.
(Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago)
To make the MAT@USC work, we needed to figure out how to help teachers all over the country become certified. Sure, it sounds like it shouldn’t be that complex. After all, we (as a nation) need great teachers and therefore have a vested interest in aiding their pursuit of the most noble profession, right?
Well, the needing great teachers part is certainly true, but we realized a number of counter-intuitive aspects of the certification process early on.
For instance:
- There wasn’t a simple, comprehensive source for certification information
- The only real place to get the information was on your states education website; When was the last time you tried navigating one of those things?
- The requirements vary wildly by state, and change frequently.
As a result, we ended up having to compile all of this information ourselves. It took weeks. We lost good men, women, and interns along the way. But when the dust finally settled, we realized that we put together the single most comprehensive guide to the teacher certification process in the country.
Armed with this database of knowledge, we began helping future teachers who were interested in the MAT@USC program understand the steps that they would need to take to become certified in their state.
But the MAT@USC is competitive. Really competitive. And there are lots of people (really great people), who we won’t be able to work with. That doesn’t mean that they won’t be phenomenal teachers, and it doesn’t mean we don’t want to help them on their important journey.
What it does mean is that we needed a way to spread the knowledge that we had gathered. We needed a way to help people everywhere quickly and easily understand the requirements and steps needed to become a certified teacher in their state.
And thus Certification Map was born.
It’s a work in progress, and there is always more to do (suggestions welcome!), but we hope that it helps you on your journey — wherever that may lead you.
— The Cert Map Team.
