A Researcher Encounters the Policy Realm: A Personal Tale

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

THE FAILURE to ensure that all of our nation's classrooms are staffed with qualified teachers is one of the most widely discussed, but least understood, problems facing our elementary and secondary schools. In recent years, dozens of reports and reform initiatives have sought to solve this problem. Unfortunately, the array of recent efforts do not address some of its key causes. One of the least recognized of these unaddressed causes is the phenomenon known as out-of-field teaching--teachers assigned to teach subjects for which they have little preparation, education, or background. This practice makes even highly qualified teachers highly unqualified if, once on the job, they are assigned to teach subjects for which they have little background or preparation. But this seemingly odd and irrational practice has been largely unknown to the public and to policy makers. One of the reasons the problem has been so little noted was an absence of accurate data. However, in the early 1990s, the release of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS)--a major new survey of the nation's elementary and secondary teachers conducted by the U.S. Department of Education--remedied this situation. Working with this dataset, several of us discovered that for the first time we could accurately calculate how much out-of-field teaching there really is. My interest in researching these issues originally stemmed from my previous experiences as a secondary school teacher. Out-of-field teaching was commonplace in the schools where I taught. I was prepared in social studies, but hardly a semester went by in which I was not also assigned a couple of classes in such fields as math or special education. I found teaching subjects for which I had little background very challenging, and my experiences left me with a number of questions: Were the schools I taught in unusual in this regard? Or was out-of-field teaching a common practice in other schools? And, if so, why? As a researcher, I wanted answers. There is a great deal of disagreement, often heated, over how much and what kinds of education and preparation teachers ought to have to be considered adequately qualified. Indeed, analogous to the much-discussed wars, it is probably not an exaggeration to refer to teacher-quality wars. In my research I decided to try to skirt this endless debate by adopting a minimal standard and focusing on the most compelling case. My primary focus became discovering how many of those teaching core academic subjects at the secondary level do not have at least a college minor in their teaching fields. Having a college minor, of course, does not guarantee that a teacher is qualified, but I viewed it as a minimal prerequisite. In short, I assumed that few parents would want or expect their teenagers to be taught, say, 11th-grade trigonometry by a teacher who did not have at least a minor in math or a related field, no matter how bright the teacher. I found, however, that this is often precisely what happens. For example, the data indicated that over a third of all secondary school teachers who teach math do not have either an undergraduate or a graduate major or minor in math, math education, or such related disciplines as engineering or physics. About one-third of all secondary school English teachers have neither a major nor a minor in English or in such related subjects as literature, communications, speech, journalism, English education, or reading education. In science, just over a quarter of all secondary school teachers do not have at least a minor in one of the sciences or in science education. Finally, about a quarter of social studies teachers are without at least a minor in any of the social sciences, in social studies education, or in history. Notably, other analysts also conducted statistical analyses of SASS and reached the same conclusion. Beginning in the mid-1990s, I began publishing the results of my investigations in numerous pieces, ranging from brief op-ed essays to lengthy scholarly articles. …