@SnailWitch, let me establish a little ethos with you before I answer your questions. I am a high school English teacher (23 years, Sonoma State grad) and I am sending my son to Cal Poly SLO this Fall as an English major.
There are twenty English teachers at my current high school and I have worked with at least one hundred others over the course of my career. The simple truth is that who you are as a person and how dedicated you are to your profession will matter far more to an administrator than where you went to college. I have seen teachers from Cal and Stanford flame out and I have seen teachers from colleges I have never heard of work magic in the classroom. My recent set of co-workers have degrees from Sac State, UCLA, UC Davis, CSUMB, Cal Poly, CSU Long Beach, UC Irvine, Chico State, UCSD, SUNY, NYU, UC Berkeley, Oklahoma, and some place in Texas. If you were to rank the schools in order of reputation and rank the teachers in order of excellence and effectiveness, the lists would NOT align in any meaningful way.
However, there are some things to consider that may help you make a decision:
If price really isn’t an issue, then the most important considerations are environment and access to professors.
Environment is huge because getting a degree in English takes a ridiculous amount of quiet time. Get used to being in the library. However, when you have to read twenty or thirty novels in a term, you also need places to re-invigorate yourself. Being in an environment that suits you without causing undue stress lets you blow off steam and absorb the interactions of humanity that are so necessary for literature interpretation and/or writing. A read/write/life balance is a must. It’s a cliche’, but you really do need to take long walks and contemplate nature/poetry/love/truth in a place that feeds your mind and soul. For some people that is the city, for others the beach. It’s personal.
As for access to professors, Shakespeare is Shakespeare anywhere you study him, so being able to speak directly to professors is a huge advantage. At SSU, I was able to walk into office hours and chat about almost anything with my professors, which was incredibly valuable. I have had multiple co-workers cite that as almost a must in their academic advancement. English is not well suited to a cookie-cutter, by-the-numbers approach. I have had a couple of co-workers who graduated from CP SLO and both of them spoke highly of their professorial interactions. My son was choosing from SSU, CSUMB, and Sac State which all have a great reputations for accessible English professors. I would have advised him against Cal Poly if it couldn’t match that access.
One more piece of advice and one acknowledgement of my limitations:
Advice: Sonoma State is unique in that producing teachers is part of their charter and a person can major in “English for Secondary Educators” rather than just creative writing or literature. This has been a huge boon for me my entire career. Cal Poly (and almost every other school) does not offer that option. That being said, make sure to balance out your major emphasis with useful English classes. Most future teachers tend to focus more on literature while a subset goes with creative writing. However, in the modern high school classroom expository reading and writing are gaining emphasis. It’s a benefit to be well-rounded rather than specialized. If you can, do volunteer work at a local high school, as well… That can be valuable. I was required to at SSU and it taught me a great deal.
Acknowledgement: I can’t speak to the necessity of program status in regards to a master’s degree to teach in a community college. Most high school English teachers are grinders. They work their day, grade in the evening, and raise their families as best they can.
I wish you the best of luck.