States fail teacher quality goal
WASHINGTON – Not a single state has a highly qualified teacher in every core class this school year as promised by President Bush’s education law. Nine states – including Idaho and Washington – along with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico face penalties.
The Education Department on Friday ordered every state to explain how it will have 100 percent of its core teachers qualified – belatedly – in the 2006-07 school year.
In the meantime, some states face the loss of federal aid because they didn’t make enough effort to comply on time, officials said.
They are Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina and Washington, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
“At some point there was, I suspect, a little bit of notion that ‘This too shall pass,’ ” said Henry Johnson, the assistant secretary over elementary and secondary education. “Well, the day of reckoning is here, and it’s not going to pass.”
Department officials would not say how much aid could be withheld from states to force compliance. But Johnson said, “In some cases, we’re talking about large amounts of money.”
States often fell short because they did not report accurate or complete data about the quality of the teacher corps, said Rene Islas, who oversees the review.
The four-year-old No Child Left Behind law says teachers must have a bachelor’s degree, a state license and proven competency in every subject they teach by this year. The first federal order of its kind, it applies to teachers of math, history and any other core class.
In grading the states, the department found that 29 have made substantial progress. They must improve but do not face sanctions.
Twelve other states, still under review, haven’t been rated.
No matter which category they are in, all the states must submit a new plan of action.
Most states give themselves good grades on teacher quality; 33 states say 90 percent to 99 percent of their classes are taught by highly qualified teachers. Most of the rest put their numbers a tier below, in a range of 70 percent to 89 percent.
What the agency wants to see most, Johnson said, is what states are doing to get experienced teachers into classrooms with large numbers of poor and minority children.
The fact that no state complied with the law on time – four years after Bush signed it with great fanfare – is due in part to the enormity of the challenge.
Some teachers, particularly in small or rural areas, handle many subjects and have not met the law’s details in each one. Many schools struggle just to find teachers in math, science or special education.