Rhode Island has become the latest state and one of the last to come up with an alternative certification route into teaching. The state's department of education has made what appears to be a decent proposal to let individuals enter the classroom who haven't gone through ed school--but only in certain subject shortage areas. Candidates must have a content-area bachelor's degree, a "B" average, three years of job experience in the area that they will be teaching, three years of experience working with kids (it's not clear how this will be interpreted), and a passing score on a national teaching exam. Once they are accepted to the program, which is only available for hard-to-fill posts in math, science, special ed, and ESL, candidates complete a summer program and then a mentorship during their first year of teaching. The feature that is most likely to limit the usefulness of this route is that candidates must have a job offer from a school before they are allowed to use this route. This probably means that the strong principals who do their own recruitment will readily seize this opportunity but weaker principals in weaker schools will not.