Chalkbeat New York:
By Monica Disare Mar 13, 2017, 4:04pm EDT
State officials voted to make it easier to become a New York state teacher on Monday by knocking off one of the state’s main teacher certification requirements.
Prospective teachers will no longer have to take the Academic Literacy Skills Test, an exam designed to measure reading and writing ability. The decision marks a significant rollback of the state’s certification requirements, but officials said the literacy test had become an unnecessary hurdle for prospective teachers.
“The issue is not that literacy is not important, literacy is everything,” said Regent Kathleen Cashin, who chairs the board’s committee on higher education. “It’s just that if you have