Releasing a new report on teacher quality, Education Secretary Rod Paige last week called upon states to radically transform their teacher certification systems by raising standards while lowering the barriers that deter many qualified candidates from entering the public-school classroom. States and universities need to focus on bringing "smart teachers with solid content knowledge" into U.S. schools, he urged. Paige recommended that states require teachers to pass rigorous tests in the subjects they will teach and create alternate routes into the classroom for professionals who have strong knowledge of the subjects they will teach but lack coursework in pedagogy.
The occasion was the Department's first report to Congress on state teacher certification programs. Concerned about the quality of the nation's teaching force, Congress in 1998 added a requirement to the Higher Education Act: states would have to hold their higher ed institutions to account for the quality of the teachers they produce. Beginning in 2001, states had to provide detailed information to the Department of Education on their teacher preparation programs. This information is summarized in the new report, "Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge" (available at http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/News/teacherprep/index.html).
The report suggests that states have a long way to go in meeting the federal deadline for having a highly qualified teacher in every high-poverty classroom, which is this September. (Under "No Child Left Behind," states must have a highly qualified teacher in every classroom by 2005.) One problem is that state certification systems allow into the classroom too many teachers who lack solid academic skills, while blocking others with stronger skills. While states typically use licensure exams to ensure that their teachers have a minimum level of knowledge and skills, the report notes that "what states consider 'minimum' is often shockingly low."
Disgracefully, many states are disguising data that reflect poorly on their teaching force. A separate analysis of the state reports on teacher preparation released by the Education Trust last week ("Interpret with Caution: The First State Title II Reports on the Quality of Teacher Preparation," by Sandra Huang, Yun Yi, and Kati Haycock, available at http://www.edtrust.org/main/documents/titleII.pdf) noted that many states and higher ed institutions report that all of their teachers are fully certified or that 100 percent of candidates passed the teacher licensure tests despite conflicting information from other sources. States came up with these fishy numbers by excluding long-term substitute teachers from their count of teachers without full certification, for instance, or by requiring teaching candidates to pass the basic skills test before even being defined as completers of the preparation program, which naturally yields a 100 percent pass rate. Only one teacher preparation institution in the whole nation was classified as low performing. Most Americans know better.
In its report, the Department of Education called on states and universities to revamp teacher preparation programs and eliminate rigid certification requirements, since there is no evidence that lengthy preparation programs are superior to streamlined programs that quickly get talented teachers into the classroom.