'No Child' Standards of Content Mastery Widely Interpreted
By Michael Alison Chandler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 13, 2007
To overhaul public education, the No Child Left Behind law required a massive expansion of student testing. But it also called for states to ensure that all teachers in core academic subjects are "highly qualified" to help students succeed -- an unprecedented mandate that has delivered less than promised.
The law, which turned five years old this week, has held schools to increasingly higher standards for student achievement. For teachers, however, standards meant to guarantee that they know their subjects are often vague and open to broad interpretation.
Legal loopholes and uneven implementation by states and the U.S. Department of Education have diluted the law's impact on the teaching workforce, some education experts say. They say that meeting the standards of quality is more about shuffling paper than achieving two vital goals: ensuring that teachers are prepared to help students succeed and reducing the teacher talent gap between rich and poor schools.
"Meeting the qualifications has become an exercise in bureaucratic compliance," said Andrew J. Rotherham, a member of the Virginia Board of Education and a former education adviser in the Clinton administration. "It's not a process that gets at the fundamental issues of quality or effectiveness." Congress may soon tackle those issues as it considers renewing the law.
The career path of Maria Lewis Ramadane shows what the mandate was meant to accomplish and its confusing results. The meaning of highly qualified, it turns out, varies sharply from place to place.
When Ramadane started teaching at Graham Park Middle School near Dumfries in 2003, the special education teacher didn't meet the law's standard because she had a provisional license. But after earning a master's degree and completing a 30-hour literacy class, she obtained full certification, and Virginia now deems her highly qualified to teach language arts.
In Maryland and the District, however, Ramadane would be asked for more: another standardized test, more professional coursework. Tougher rules are probably one reason Maryland and the District report lower rates of classrooms with highly qualified teachers: 79 percent in Maryland and 51 percent in the District, compared with 95 percent in Virginia. D.C. public schools -- and some in Maryland -- also face major recruiting obstacles.
This week, senior Democratic lawmakers discussed an extension of No Child Left Behind with President Bush. In the coming congressional debate over the law, teacher quality is likely to be a key issue. Some experts favor shifting the emphasis from "highly qualified" to "highly effective" teachers, requiring states to look not just at credentials but how well individual teachers help students learn and perform on tests.
U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the new chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, said in an interview that teacher quality is one of his highest priorities. He has proposed spending more money to recruit and retain qualified teachers, particularly in low-income districts.
Miller said the current standards for subject matter competence and certification are the "bare minimum" and said that the government should establish systems to increase teacher effectiveness. "The law itself does not make you highly qualified," he said.
Some leaders of teacher unions say that raising salaries and improving working conditions are better ways to raise the caliber of the workforce. Princess Moss, president of the Virginia Education Association, questioned what she called "paperwork and needless requirements," particularly in areas with persistent teacher shortages, such as special education.
Ramadane said she has not found Virginia's requirements difficult, and she has taken extra classes in reading and writing instruction so she can keep challenging her Prince William County students. "Most teachers that I know go above and beyond," she said.
The Bush administration has pushed aggressively to hold schools accountable for raising student test scores and narrowing achievement gaps, but it has been more flexible on teacher quality.
In late 2005, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings pushed back a June 2006 deadline for states to reach full compliance with the highly qualified teacher requirement, giving them a one-year pass if they could demonstrate progress. Spellings said states would not lose federal funding if they submitted a plan with an acceptable definition of highly qualified teachers, accurate data and steps to ensure that experienced and qualified teachers are spread equitably among rich and poor schools.
By August, only Maryland and eight other states had plans that met all requirements. The rest, including Virginia, had to make revisions to address the equity issue, as did the District.
U.S. education officials and independent analysts cite some advances. Data show that about nine out of 10 classrooms nationwide in 2005 were headed by a highly qualified teacher; in 2003, the rate was closer to eight out of 10. Experts note that states have created incentives and opportunities for teachers to obtain additional training and have reversed a long-standing reliance on emergency credentials to fill classrooms. In some cities, including the District, school systems have fired teachers who are not fully licensed.
Spellings said the drive for content expertise has improved the workforce.
"The whole notion that you have to have grounding in the subject area that you're teaching makes a lot of sense to policymakers and to moms and dads," she said. "You know, the old you-can't-teach-what-you-don't-know philosophy."
According to the federal law, to become highly qualified, a first-year teacher must have a college degree, a full state license and some mastery of content -- provable by coursework or a standardized test.
The first two requirements are straightforward. The third has been interpreted in many ways, particularly for veteran teachers -- defined in Virginia and Maryland as those with at least one year of experience -- for whom the law is more lenient.
To prove expertise, teachers can choose from a menu of options that often have little to do with subject matter.
In Maryland, teachers can show they know their subjects in part by taking education courses or earning teaching awards. Virginia offers credit for developing curricula, mentoring other teachers or attending a 30-hour "content knowledge institute."
Last year, the Bush administration objected to a Virginia policy allowing new high school special education teachers to take a less-rigorous middle school content test. It also faulted a policy letting veteran teachers assert that they are sufficiently knowledgeable if they hold an advanced degree in any subject, not just in the subject they teach. Virginia tightened the rules, but state officials said the policies in question affected only about 155 of the state's 99,000 teachers.
Virginia officials report only a small teacher-quality gap, with 6 percent of classrooms in the state's poorest schools lacking highly qualified teachers, compared with 3 percent in the richest schools.
In Maryland, the disparity is greater: Nearly 40 percent of classes in the poorest schools lack highly qualified teachers, compared with about 10 percent in the richest schools. Especially in Baltimore and Prince George's County, administrators often must resort to hiring inexperienced teachers who move on after a few years.
But Maryland has made progress -- the portion of classrooms with highly qualified teachers rose from 67 percent in 2004 to more than 79 percent in 2006.
At Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, the compliance rate rose from 52 percent in 2004 to 76 percent in 2006. But the hunt for highly qualified teachers remains intense.
As this school year approached, Principal Karen Coley said she found herself waiting for a seventh-grade science teacher to "drop from the sky."
The school system's recruiter, known as the "rainmaker," found a candidate who was promising but not rated highly qualified. One recent morning, that teacher quizzed students about the difference between chemical and physical properties. "A natural," Coley called her.
But in the future, Coley is hoping to find a more reliable stream of highly qualified teachers.
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