I Want More: Does a Divide Between Charter and Public School Teachers Cause Different Desires in Certification Programs?

The number of teachers entering the profession through alternative certification and the number of charter schools in America have both increased over the past twenty years. While there is a great deal of research on the efficacy of different paths to certification (and elements within those paths) on teachers in public schools, there is little research exploring the needs of charter school teachers in alternative certification programs. Since charter school teachers may be a substantively different population than public school teachers, research that focuses solely on public school teachers might be incomplete. This paper uses a data set of 42 matched-pair beginning teachers by school type (charter vs. public) who are all alternatively certified and the Schools and Staffing Survey (2007-8) to explore the divide between public and charter school teachers. We determine that the public and charter school teachers in this sample believe that there is a large ideological divide between