One Year Ago Congress Defined Novices "Highly Qualified Teachers"
Guest post by Tara Kini, Public Advocates Inc.
Today marks the first anniversary of one of the most far-reaching legislative actions in education in recent memory. It was highly controversial and addressed a subject at the forefront of the ongoing debate about educational equity. But if you are like most Americans, you probably have no idea that it ever happened. And that is exactly what the measure's proponents wanted.
Congress stealthily slipped into a temporary budget bill last year language that allows states to label teachers as "highly qualified" before they have finished or even begun training through alternative certification programs. This measure codified an administrative approach initially adopted during the Bush years and essentially gutted one of the most central equity provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act. For now, the legislation has ended many education advocates' hopes of addressing in the near term a problem that has lingered for many years: the high concentration of untrained teachers in schools serving low-income, predominately