Go St. Louis!!

Great article today covering our start in Missouri. It has been such an amazing response from some amazing people. Our first certified teacher completed last week - - an electrical engineer who has been teaching in a private school for three years.

My favorite part of the article is where the cite the recent Mathematica study showing 85% of our new teachers are still in the classroom - an amazingly high number - and in the next paragraph the NEA rep says he doesn't think our teachers will stay in the classroom. Never let facts get in the way of your talking points.

Our new teacher discussion forums have launched giving our candidates an online community to work with and our next prepare to teach workshop will go up next week.

In the world of education reform - progress like this always feels good!

Missouri Legislative Session

The Missouri Legislative session ended last Friday. It was not a great session. Only 147 bills passed out of 1,954 filed. That means they only passed 7.5% of the bills that were filed and the ABCTE bill was one of them. Pretty amazing and our thanks goes out to the Missouri Chamber, some outstanding legislators plus Kent Gaines and Nikki Strong who helped us get this done.

Already 62 Missourians have enrolled in our program – that is a huge number for the first month and definitely shows that there is significant demand for a true alternative teacher certification program in the state.