Quality in question
No one doubts that every classroom needs a "highly qualified teacher."
The question is how do you turn this into law?
 

Late last year, the Economic Policy Institute sponsored a Capitol Hill briefing on No Child Left Behind and the law’s efforts to guarantee a “highly qualified teacher in every classroom.” There was little disagreement among the academics, researchers, and state and local administrators who offered their views at the Washington, D.C., event: Yes, every student deserves a highly qualified teacher and, yes, command of subject matter is important for teachers to possess. But the panelists also agreed that these goals can and must be pursued under NCLB in a way that doesn’t ignore classroom practice, experience and longstanding efforts in many states and districts to improve the profession. It’s a message that AFT president Sandra Feldman and other union leaders have been hammering home from the start (see related story, page 9). And, equally important, it’s a message that individual classroom teachers have been passionately voicing for several months.

But are regulators and policymakers listening?

For this I wait tables?!

So what do you do if you’re a 20-something who’s supporting a household and paying off student loans while working in a relatively low-paying profession like teaching?

If you’re Renee Pullen, a science and social studies teacher at Herndon Magnet Elementary/Middle School in Shreveport, La., you wait tables in the evenings and on weekends to make ends meet. It makes for long, hard days but Pullen is willing to put up with it—for the simple reason that it keeps her in the career that’s her life’s goal.

“I just love teaching. I like seeing kids understand and learn,” the AFT member explains. And there’s good reason to believe that Pullen and her Herndon colleagues are pretty good at what they do. The latest results of statewide student achievement exams show that Herndon was posting “exemplary growth” (the highest designation possible), and the school also made its adequate yearly progress targets under NCLB.

Whether Pullen or many of her peers stay in their chosen profession has become more of an open question, however, now that most have been informed they are not deemed highly qualified under the law. That’s because she, like many of her colleagues and middle school teachers around the country, earned degrees in elementary education. And what was good enough to earn Pullen a B.S. in education and a state teaching certificate is no longer enough under the state’s interpretation of federal law.

“They’re telling me that I need to go back to school or take tests in order to stay where I am as a teacher,” she says. “I would like to go back to school if I could afford it. I just don’t have the time and the money.”

And the climate is also testing her belief in the profession, adds Pullen, who wonders whether waiting tables will make as much sense in the era of “highly qualified” as it does now. “There’s so much that keeps me in teaching, but one thing I really don’t like is that it’s so political sometimes.”

Pullen believes the push behind this portion of the law is all about political expediency—teacher testing and advanced degrees—rather than constructive solutions built on professional development. And she’s seen too many teachers with advanced degrees “who just can’t do it” to believe that route is anything like a solution for schools.

“The people who are going to lose are the children.”

And the first shall be last

Alyson Mike is beginning to feel like she’s in a love-hate relationship with the federal government.

Displayed proudly on the wall of her office space at East Valley Middle School in East Helena, Mont., is a 2002 presidential award for science teaching. However, the citation is a far cry from the message she received in a face-to-face meeting with her superintendent last year.

Based on the state’s interpretation of new rules governing highly qualified teachers under the No Child Left Behind Act, Mike would not be considered a “highly qualified” teacher because she teaches biology, chemistry and physics at her school—yet only possesses a major in biology. She either would have to get advanced degrees or pass a test to keep her position when the new regulations take hold in 2006.

“It seemed like a little bit of a contradiction, considering the fact that President Bush was the one who signed the award” for excellence in science teaching, deadpanned Mike, who would like to ask Bush: “Is [the award] worth the paper it’s written on?”

And the AFT member points to other factors that “could make this an embarrassing situation” for all involved. Among the honors she has won in her 16-year career: Shell Science Award finalist, Milken Award recipient and 2001 Montana Science Teacher Association’s Middle School Teacher of the Year.

And if that’s not enough, Mike also was named Montana Teacher of the Year for 2003. In fact, all three of the teachers honored most recently as Montana Teachers of the Year wouldn’t make the cut under NCLB.

There could be a saving grace for Mike, however, since she may be considered highly qualified under federal law by virtue of having earned certification as an early-adolescence science teacher from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. “We’re investigating this, and it’s still kind of gray,” says Mike. One thing she’s sure of, however: The “highly qualifed” component of the law needs a reality check.

“When you start tweezing it apart, the last people who are being considered are the kids,” says Mike, who thinks NCLB’s emphasis on teacher testing and subject-area degrees is naive at best. “What bothers me about it is this assumption that if you know your content you can teach,” she says. “Of course you have to know content…. But there are a lot of people who are content-area certified and they’re not that hot.”

By the same token, there are a lot of talented, effective teachers who are going to be forced to jump through regulatory hoops simply because they lack the right paperwork, Mike warns. “Realistically, in my building there are only two who are considered highly qualified. It is just getting [effective teachers] up in arms [and] there are a lot of teachers who are nearing retirement who say ‘I’m not going through this.’”

And Mike also wonders where the adequate resources that are supposed to help teachers and students navigate this high-expectations climate are to be found. “We’re supposed to have this big infusion of dollars, but we haven’t seen it.”

Turmoil: It's a bad thing

For an 875-page law, No Child Left Behind is remarkably open-ended when it comes to defining how teachers are supposed to show they are highly qualified. To meet the requirement, teachers certainly can sit for a test or tests in their teaching areas, or they can get a degree or degrees with a concentration in their classroom fields. Or they can “do something else”—with the “something else” defined by the states and approved by the U.S. Department of Education. This route—called the high, objective, uniform state standard of evaluation or HOUSSE—is an opportunity for states to inject a little respect for what teachers have already accomplished in their professional lives back into the process of determining who is and isn’t highly qualified. Some states, such as New Mexico, have put this provision to work: The state has effectively dovetailed its own well-developed licensure process into NCLB.

Other states either can’t or won’t seize the opportunity.

The AFT and other education organizations are contesting recent Education Department guidance that would allow states to opt out of HOUSSE—a move that would deny veteran teachers opportunities to be deemed highly qualified based on their experience and accomplishments, and force thousands to sit for the same exam administered to teachers just out of college. Only 13 states have submitted data showing that they’ve adopted a HOUSSE standard, says Michele McLaughlin, an NCLB specialist with the AFT educational issues department. The low number is hardly surprising, given the relative ease of scoring a test versus the challenges involved in creating HOUSSE. The Education Department’s guidance tilts the playing field toward expediency, rather than professionalism, in determining who is and isn’t qualified to teach.

What happens when states are asleep at the switch? Ask Wendy Walsh, a Philadelphia teacher who has spent most of her 30-year career teaching middle school English and social studies. Pennsylvania has not defined what HOUSSE means in the state, so teachers are either being forced to get degrees—hardly a realistic option for thousands of middle school teachers who would have to seek one, two or perhaps three degrees—or they will have to take the Praxis exam.

Walsh, who recently took the test and passed it, was underwhelmed by this de facto process of taking an off-the-shelf exam, one that has nothing to do with the district’s curriculum, and pawning it off as a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for highly qualified teachers.

“If you want highly qualified contestants for ‘Jeopardy’ to teach class, then we’ve got the right approach,” says Walsh after taking the language arts test. “There were a lot of questions about Poe—well we don’t teach a lot of Poe in the middle grades in Philadelphia…. The format jumped around, there was no coherence, no clarity, no sequencing…. If a teacher were to test like this, he would be drawn and quartered.”

Adding insult to injury: Opportunities to prepare for the exam have been few and far between for teachers. “In May, I called to get into the June practice session, and they said I may not get it. What is this saying? Teachers can’t even give up their vacation time to practice and sit for the test?!... The district wasn’t giving me much, but [it wasn’t] getting much from the state either,” Walsh explains.

Even though she jumped through the hoops that led to a “highly qualified” designation, Walsh is angry about the whole process and predicts that many excellent teachers will simply leave the profession rather than subject themselves to these demeaning procedures. “My standards are high,” says Walsh, who currently is working as a peer evaluator in the district. “I have no problem taking an assessment test if it’s done right. I’m a parent and I want highly qualified teachers in the classroom, too.

“But the feeling I got [throughout the process] was that someone was playing a game of ‘gotcha’ with me. And teachers resent it.”

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