The Search for Highly Qualified Teachers

At the same time that NCLB has given states a mandate to staff their classrooms with "highly qualified teachers," the federal government is pushing a dangerously narrow definition of the knowledge and skills that today's teachers need. OVER THE last decade, policy makers and business leaders have come to realize what parents have always known - teachers make the most difference in student achievement. Thanks to new statistical and analytical methods used by a wide range of researchers, the evidence is mounting that teacher quality accounts for the lion's share of variance in student test scores.1 However, while consensus is growing among school reformers that teachers are the most important school-related determinant of student achievement, there is not much more than ephemeral agreement on what we mean by "teaching quality" or what steps we must take to see that every student has access to high-quality teachers.2 Much has been written about the ideological divide between those who view teaching as highly complex work, requiring professionals with formal, specialized preparation, and those who view it as routine work that most reasonably smart people could do (and would do more readily if "misguided" government or professional regulations did not limit entry into the field). 3 The former view is well represented in the research of Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University and the oft- cited reports of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF). NCTAF's reform framework emphasizes teacher education, state licensing, professional accountability, and compensation as the primary means to strengthen teacher quality. These positions are based on evidence that good teachers must have a host of subject-matter and technical knowledge, including the knowledge and skills needed to help every member of an increasingly diverse student population reach much higher academic standards.4 The latter view is best reflected in the statements by Chester Finn and the reports from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which recommend a number of market-based initiatives designed to countermand traditional teacher education practices. For example, the foundation advocates for policies designed to loosen, if not eliminate, existing requirements for those entering the field of education. In their place, Finn would institute short-cut alternative certification programs that he and his followers believe will improve the quality and quantity of the teacher supply.5 The foundation's positions are based on a number of studies that link teachers' scores on aptitude and subject-matter tests to student achievement scores, as well as on the assumption that the teaching profession has - and will continue to have - a very weak knowledge base. The foundation's perspective is that new teachers can easily learn on the job anything they need to know about how to teach. With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, more popularly known as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, what was once a largely academic debate has now become a national controversy with long-term consequences for the public school systems of every state. NCLB's mandate that every teacher of a core academic subject be "highly qualified" by the end of the 2005-06 school year poses unprecedented challenges for state education policy leaders and for practitioners. In the hands of highly capable leaders, this mandate also offers unprecedented opportunities to reshape teacher preparation in ways that will finally produce the gains in student achievement that reformers have long sought. NCLB's "highly qualified teacher" provisions are now familiar to most education watchers. The law states that highly qualified teachers must "hold at least a bachelor's degree from a four-year institution; hold full state certification; and demonstrate competence in their subject area. " In addition, the law requires state departments of education to publicly report what they are doing to improve teacher quality along with how their efforts are progressing, including identifying the distribution of "highly qualified" teachers across low- and high- poverty schools. …