‘Be bold.” That was the message delivered last week by an associate deputy under secretary at the federal Department of Education, Michael Petrilli, speaking during a teacher quality summit at Austin, Texas. The topic was teacher certification. The remarks are recounted in this week’s edition of the Fordham Foundation’s Education Gadfly newsletter. We’d all be helped were New York’s legislators to get themselves a copy and the teachers unions to take notice.

The Byzantine process one must go through to become a certified teacher in New York City is a matter these columns have touched on before. It’s a process that involves questionable education school courses and mountains of paperwork. It’s also a process that has become all the more important since the New York State Board of Regents mandated that all New York City public school teachers must be certified as of September 1, 2003. The city’s Department of Education has estimated this will oust about 3,000 teachers this year. This despite the fact that certification status has little to do with who is and is not a good teacher.

While some might argue that new standards imposed under the new No Child Left Behind Act mandating “highly qualified” teachers give states and school districts less flexibility, Mr. Petrilli said quite the opposite at Austin. “If they want to, [states] can dramatically streamline their processes and create alternate routes to full state certification that target talented people who would be turned off by traditional preparation and certification programs,” Mr. Petrilli said.

Lest one interpret this as referring to so-called “alternative certification” programs — such as the NYC Teaching Fellows program, which streamlines some but leaves much bureaucracy in place — Mr. Petrilli’s said: “For example, states could adopt the new system created by the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence, an organization supported by a Department of Education grant, that has created an extremely rigorous assessment system for new teachers, in both content areas and professional teaching knowledge.”

Mr. Petrilli continued: “States could decide that individuals who pass the relevant sections of the American Board assessment would be considered fully certified to teach, regardless of where they learned the important knowledge and skills that were tested.…Consider whether you can create a route to full certification for highly talented people, people with strong academic skills, perhaps with specific experiences working with children, but routes that will make it more likely for these people to say yes to teaching.”

In other words, certification without bureaucracy. What better way to end the perpetual teacher shortage we hear so much about.