THE ‘HIGHLY QUALIFED’ GAP+ Report: NOT PREPARED FOR CLASS + Letters + smf’s 2¢
The 'highly qualified' gap: No Child Left Behind mandates such teachers in all U.S. schools. A new study shows that little progress has been made in meeting that requirement.
LA TIMES EDITORIAL
November 26, 2010 - While states and school districts hotly debate the issue of whether student test scores should be used to evaluate teachers, the nation has been virtually ignoring a more basic question: whether those teachers are even qualified in the first place. Too many of them aren't.
The No Child Left Behind Act mandated that all students be taught by "highly qualified" teachers. And although we disagree with many elements of that 2001 federal school reform act — its rigidity, its use of the wrong measurements to assess student progress — this provision always made more sense.
Among other things, a highly qualified teacher in the secondary schools is supposed to have expertise in the subject he or she teaches, whether that means having majored in the subject in college or having a credential to teach it. Ample research has found that students learn better when their teachers have such formal expertise. Yet a new report by the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving the