Education Week, January 2003
This bulky annual data compilation cum policy analysis from Education Week is getting better. If you can find a shelf large enough for its 182 oversized (and un-foldable) pages, you'll want to retain and refer back to it from time to time. As everybody knows, this year's issue focuses on teachers, in particular on the "teacher gap" (the concentration of less able, less prepared and less experienced teachers in schools serving poor kids vs. the relatively stronger teaching workforce in middle class schools) and on state policies that may boost the supply of "highly qualified" teachers, which are supposed to be the only kind left in U.S. classrooms three years hence. (Besides state-level data, this year the editors surveyed 30 large school districts.) It's somewhat circumscribed in its policy imagination, given that it reports on what exists in American public education today rather than thinking anew about what might be done differently. You will not, therefore, find much discussion of (say) giving school principals sweeping authority over the employment and compensation of their teachers - nor will you find much effort to learn from innovations in charter and private schools. Despite those limitations, this report tallies an impressive array of efforts to solve a tangle of teacher-related problems. Mostly, though, it illustrates how far most states still have to go to get within striking distance of real solutions, and how intractable are a host of local problems (e.g. the sluggish, bureaucratic maze of teacher hiring and placement in urban school systems) that are almost immune to state-level policy manipulation.
Though the press hasn't said much on the topic, this edition of Quality Counts also updates sundry indicators of state policy, practice and performance that bear on achievement, standards and accountability, school climate, resources, etc. For the most part, it deploys the best available data to be found on these topics, including some from less conventional sources than before. Here, too, there's progress to be glimpsed but vast distances yet to be traversed. For example, this year just 19 states have in place the kinds of testing regime that No Child Left Behind will require of every state. Though nearly all states issue "school report cards," fewer than half "disaggregate" their achievement results according to the various demographic categories mandated in NCLB. Just 24 states publish the pass rates of their teacher-training programs (though all must report those rates to the federal government) and, across the 35 states that claim to identify low-performing teacher preparation programs, a grand total of just 59 such programs have as yet been fingered for this dubious distinction. And so on and on. The publication, in other words, is considerably superior to the performance that it reports. You probably already have a copy but, in case not, you can get one by surfing to http://www.edweek.org/sreports/qc03/
