Mayor Bloomberg and his schools chancellor Joel Klein made a giant move in the right direction yesterday with the sweeping changes they announced in the city’s schools. Perhaps the finest aspect of the mayor’s speech was its take-no-prisoners tone, reminiscent of Mayor Giuliani at his best. Mr. Giuliani famously said in April 1999, “The whole system should be blown up and a new one should be put in its place.” Mr. Bloomberg yesterday did just that. He acknowledged that the system is now “employing thousands of people in duplicative and unnecessary administrative jobs.” And he vowed, “By the beginning of the next school year, these notorious bureaucratic dinosaurs will be extinct.” He said that only 200 of the city’s 1,200 schools are successful. And he promised a new emphasis on literacy, “with a daily focus on phonics.”

There are aspects on the mayor’s plan, however, about which we have our doubts. It’s not clear, for example, that a centralized command-and-control approach, imposing a single standardized curriculum on the 1,000 non-successful schools, is the best way to foster competition and excellence, or to accommodate the different learning styles of different students. The mayor did express hope of seeing, “many new charter schools formed in the years ahead,” but his focus seems to be on enforcing standards rather than unleashing competition and experimentation.

Moreover, Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein would be wise to take a tough look at the city’s complex system for certifying teachers. As much as any amount of middle management and curriculum reform, revamping the way New York City hires and trains its teachers could do wonders for improving instruction in our city’s schools.

The children of Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Klein, the former schools chancellor, Harold Levy, and many members of the state’s Board of Regents have attended private schools. As such, these educational policymakers and luminaries have allowed their own offspring to be instructed by faculties virtually devoid of teachers formally licensed by the state. Yet the educational establishment still clings to the notion that, despite evidence to the contrary, being a “certified” teacher and being a “qualified” teacher go hand-in-hand when it comes to the public school system. To elaborate our objections to the certification process in New York City we have reproduced on the opposite page a chart offered up by the United Federation of Teachers to those entering the profession.

If the labyrinth at right is not enough to scare off newcomers, perhaps the union might want to try leaving threatening messages on prospective teachers’ home answering machines. “The fees for licensing and fingerprinting alone may total almost $200,” they could say in a menacing voice. “And you have to pay for many of them with postal money orders.” After all, the reason for teachers unions to support strict certification standards is that they limit the pool of teachers competing for jobs. This allows the unions to cry “teacher shortage” year after year, claiming that more money is needed in the form of higher salaries to lure fresh blood.

No doubt, raising salaries does increase the number of applicants for teaching positions. A pay hike along with a faltering economy upped the number of certified teachers applying for positions in the New York City school system significantly last year. So did a provision in the new teachers’ contract that upped the amount the city can pay to hire certified teachers from other school districts. However, a similar inflow of talent into the teaching profession could be achieved by simply scrapping the certification maze entirely. Instead of state licensing, teachers could be hired and trained, and then kept on or let go as performance warrants, just like in private schools.

To be sure, the unions and the education schools would let loose a howl. We’d be told we were letting incompetents and ignoramuses teach our children. But the inflow of talent from people who are accomplished academically, are accomplished professionally, want to embark on a second career, and want to work with children — but lack the fortitude to brave the certification system — would be enormous. Just look at the New York City Teaching Fellows program, an alternative certification program that Chancellor Levy started in 2000. The program gives recent college graduates and career-changers a month of intensive education courses and then assigns them to the lowest-performing schools. The program has grown tenfold since its first year. In one recent year, the city stopped taking applications after 15,000 potential teachers applied for about 2,000 slots. Unfortunately, the program’s size is limited and it still wastes money and the participants’ time by making the teaching fellows meet the city’s maximum licensing requirements while they work as teachers.

Better to embrace the essence of the teaching fellows program — lowering the barriers to entry for enthusiastic candidates with much to offer — aggressively, than to leave the mammoth bureaucratic system in place and simply crank up salaries. Certification has not been proven to improve classroom performance. In fact, studies (by economists Hanushek, Podgursky, Ballou, for instance) have found little to no correlation between certification and classroom performance and no evidence that a master’s degree improves teaching skills. As Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute pointed out to us yesterday, “The most sophisticated education consumers in this city are the several thousand families who send their kids to private schools … you don’t hear them complain.” Further, Mr. Stern points out, you don’t see the principals at schools like Collegiate, Trinity, or Dalton sending their teachers off to take classes at education schools.

No one would argue that all of the uncertified teachers currently teaching in the city school system are qualified. About 3,000 of them are uncertified because they have consistently failed the state’s subject-matter tests. The students would be better off if these teachers were let go. And no one would argue that the city should pluck recent college graduates from the herd and send them, with no preparation, in to teach 2nd grade. Instead, the private school model could be followed, where new teachers are brought into school early to be briefed and trained — though this would require changes in the teachers’ contract, which prevents schools from asking new teachers to come in early.

Scrapping the certification system would require a significant waiver from the state department of education. But we’re confident that Chancellor Klein has the perfect bully pulpit from which to request one. “You gave me a waiver because you thought that my skills could improve education in New York City,” Mr. Klein could say. “Let’s give the same benefit of the doubt to thousands of eager New Yorkers.”