The Near Impossibility of Testing for Teacher Quality

The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) mandated that a highly qualified teacher be in all our nation's classrooms by academic year 2005-2006. To accomplish this laudable goal, each state must define what it means by a highly qualified teacher. States are permitted to use teacher licensure tests to demonstrate to the federal government that their teachers are highly qualified, that is, capable, competent, skilled, trained, practiced, and so forth. The theory of action behind the policy is that if America's teachers were of sufficiently high quality, then education would improve. But all this appears to be political spectacle (Smith, 2004); pure theater with no other purpose than to look like something positive is happening, whereas it is not. The way to recognize spectacle is through analysis of the slogans and policies promulgated by politicians. For example, although the call is to ensure highly qualified teachers, there is no evidence to suggest that teachers, as a group, are not now highly qualified. Perhaps this legislation is designed in part to scare ordinary citizens into thinking that millions of unqualified teachers are in charge of their children, although the 3 million teachers we now have in our schools appear to be overwhelmingly qualified to be teaching. How do we know that America's teachers as a group are competent, skilled, and qualified to teach? One way we know is from the evidence we collect on how well our children are learning, because the ability to promote learning in children must be part of the criteria applied when we designate a teacher as highly qualified. Evidence of learning is obtained from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), from which there is evidence of growth for all racial and ethnic groups among 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds in all three of the subject areas regularly tested: reading, mathematics, and science. In fact, on the NAEP reading tests, scores for 9-year-old African Americans place them approximately 2 years ahead of where their parents scored when the tests were first introduced (Berliner, 2004) The quality of our teachers can also be inferred through the performance of American 9-year-old students in reading. On Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) tests, U.S. students performed remarkably well. Despite the Bush administration's criticism of reading instruction in the United States, PIRLS shows White American students performing better than those of the highest performing nation in the world; all U.S. students, combined, placed about third in the world statistically; and even America's minority public school students scored above the international average (Berliner, 2004). These results raise questions about the claim that we lack qualified teachers of reading (for more on how the premise of a failing school system cannot be supported, see Berliner, 2004). Certainly America's poor and minority students do not do well in most national and international assessments. In particular, it is these students who need access to more qualified teachers in their schools. However, it is hard to make the case that America's teachers in general are not qualified, as implied by the NCLB legislation. Additional examination of the federal requirement for highly qualified teachers reveals that no means are offered to accomplish the desired goal, suggesting that nothing is expected to happen. Moreover, the language used to rally the politically faithful is kept purposely ambiguous, with the term highly qualified providing no concrete referents for anyone to understand what is so ardently being promoted. Furthermore, demands for highly qualified teachers must take into account the relationship between teacher quality and the pay and status of teachers in our society. Attracting "high-quality" teachers--whatever that might turn out to be--may be more difficult than imagined by legislators, given the economic and social status of teachers in our society. …