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Today, Mi is 33 and founder of a startup that aims to give Chinese kids the kind of education American children receive in top U.S. schools. Called VIPKid, the company matches Chinese students aged five to 12 with predominantly North American instructors to study English, math, science and other subjects. Classes take place online, typically for two or three 25-minute sessions each week.
Mi is capitalizing on an alluring arbitrage opportunity. In China, there are hundreds of millions of kids whose parents are willing to pay up if they can get high-quality education. In the U.S. and Canada, teachers are often underpaid—and many have quit the profession because they couldn't make a decent living. Growth has been explosive. The three-year-old company started this year with 200 teachers and has grown to 5,000, now working with 50,000 children. Next year, Mi anticipates she'll expand to 25,000 teachers and 200,000 children.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday December 22 2016, @04:50PM
If the certifications are required to be a teacher, then what exactly is an "untrained" teacher?
I just wanted to note that the whole "certification" thing is a lot more complicated for public schools, particularly in "shortage" areas (which are typically math and science teachers in a lot of states). When I taught high school, I started off as uncertified -- in fact, the whole reason I even got into teaching was that I heard a news report about how many classrooms would be starting the school year with a substitute on the first day of school due to teacher shortages, so I started looking around for positions to do a bit of "public service" at that point in my life.
Anyhow, it varied from state to state, but I was hired under what was called an "emergency permit" which generally granted teachers 3 years to become certified, thought there were some sort of exemptions that I think could allow that to even be extended another year or two under special circumstances. Things changed a bit with "No Child Left Behind" which was initially sold as something to stop this practice of uncertified teachers -- but most states basically just renamed things and ultimately ended up with a similar system.
There's a LOT of this going on in most states. And once you factor in the "burn-out" factor among teachers, where the MAJORITY of new teachers leave the profession within ~5 years, you realize that a lot of these new folks either never finish their certification or quite soon after, meaning there's a LOT of uncertified teachers continuously required to staff public schools. Again, this is highest in areas like math or science, since people with those degrees are more likely to be able to find jobs with better salaries elsewhere.
But the net effect of this whole certification shuffle at many public schools is that the worst public schools are often stuck with substitute teachers or people who are hired with no real hope of ever becoming certified in this area. The first school I taught math in, I was hired along with a woman who had a psychology degree. She was also assigned to teach general math, though as far I as can tell whenever I entered her classroom, the students did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. She seemed like a reasonable person, but I'm guessing she was just using this "emergency permit" thing to get a year or two hanging out with high school kids until she could actually find a job she'd prefer more.
Not an argument for or against certification in general -- just noting that the system is NOT just as it is claimed to be where all public school teachers are certified. And certification requirements vary VASTLY from state to state, and expectations in individual universities for education degrees or teacher prep programs also vary significantly in rigor.