'Just Say No' to Unqualified Teachers (1998)

IT SOUNDED so sensible. Yet Just say didn't work too well as cure for the problems of adolescent drug use. It was too simplistic to get at the core reasons why young people do unwise things. Could work with another tough problem involving decisions that adult policy makers choose to make? The nation's leading researcher on teacher quality, Linda Darling- Hammond of Stanford University, insists that school districts must just say to hiring unqualified teachers. Her strong admonition comes at time when the nation faces the largest teacher shortage in its history. By conservative estimates, the demand for additional will reach about 200,000 per year for the next 10 years, and one-half to two-thirds of them will be first-time teachers, according to Richard Riley, U.S. secretary of education. If school districts and states follow the traditional warm body approach to filling teacher vacancies, large percentage of new hires in the future will be on emergency certificates and will land jobs primarily teaching the students who are hardest to teach -- those in low-income urban and rural areas. In 1994 almost one-fourth of new hires had no license or substandard one in the subject they were asked to teach. If the past is prologue, 22% of newly hired will be gone from the classroom within three years. In urban areas, only half of the newly hired last that long. Policy makers and administrators might scoff at the idea that now is the time to focus on improving teacher quality. As Mari Pearlman of the Educational Testing Service puts it, principal faced with choosing between packing classroom with 45 youngsters or hiring someone on an emergency certificate doesn't really have much choice at all. Darling-Hammond's argument, however, is that there are choices presented to policy makers. Indeed, in many instances is because policy makers too often say yes that principal's desire to have qualified staff is compromised. Some of her points, contained originally in the 1996 report, What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future, from the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, which she directs, follow: * The number of new currently prepared each year is more than adequate to satisfy the demand for new teachers; stands at about twice the number actually hired. Because of the lack of reciprocity in licensing across state lines, she argues, it is often difficult to get from where they are prepared to where they are needed. * Some shortages are less function of the labor market and more result of cumbersome hiring procedures that discourage candidates or of belated decisions on how many district needs to hire. In these cases, the pool of available seeks employment elsewhere. * Some districts refuse to hire more-experienced, better-qualified because they cost more. Some districts let large numbers of qualified go through early retirement buy-out plans in order to reduce overall salary costs. These districts then hire less- experienced and even unqualified teachers. States and districts that refuse to do such things -- that just say -- wind up with better-qualified teaching force and higher student achievement. Research based on the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has shown that, after controlling for student characteristics like poverty and language status, the strongest predictor of state-level student achievement in reading and math . . . was each state's proportion of well-qualified teachers -- that is, those with full certification and major in the subject they are teaching. Furthermore, adds Darling-Hammond, a strong negative predictor of student achievement was the proportion of on emergency certificates. States with the highest number of qualified in high schools, including Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Wisconsin, routinely score higher on NAEP tests. …