ABSTRACT
In the 1990s U.S. state governments and universities could not develop alternative and compressed teaching certification options quickly enough to meet the nation’s demand for new teachers (Olson, 2000). One of the most popular of these options was the graduate level certification program, which benefited myriad constituenciesuniversities, school districts, individual schools, potential teachers, and city kids-in innumerable ways (Darling-Hammond & Cobb, 1996). In startlingly brief turnaround times, masters certification programs (often called “Master of Arts in Teaching” or MAT programs) supplied universities with an entirely new population of students, furnished school districts with an additional resource for their growing demand for teachers, and delivered a more mature population of novice educators to school faculties already facing a dire need for new teachers (Mayer, Mullens, & Moore, 2000; Olson & Jerald, 1998).
