Finding Truth in Teacher Qualifications
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 30, 2003; 10:02 AM
When the states submitted to Washington their reports on the quality of their teachers last September, it was an important moment in the most daring attempt ever to raise education standards in the United States. Wisconsin in particular appeared to have much to celebrate.
The Badger state submitted data to the U.S. Education Department showing that 98.6 percent of teachers in classrooms statewide and an even more astonishing 96.9 percent of teachers in high-poverty schools were highly qualified. This meant, under the new federal rules, that they had a college degree, full certification or licensure and demonstrated they knew well the content of what they were teaching.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel published a front-page headline calling the state the "best in the nation." The state superintendent put out a press release saying "Wisconsin has set the standard in terms of teacher quality for all other states to follow."
But something about those numbers did not smell right to the researchers and policy experts at the Education Trust. What they found, and how Wisconsin and other states have reacted to the deeply skeptical report they just released, takes us to an entirely new stage in the effort to make schools better.
The idea is to enlist non-educators -- parents, taxpayers, even reporters like me -- in the process of improving schools by giving us the best possible information about what is going on. Will that work?
The non-profit Education Trust is housed in a crowded group of offices on the second floor of an office building on K Street in Washington. K Street, as the recent HBO series of that name made clear, is an influence peddlers' enclave in our nation's capital. The Education Trust doesn't give money to congressional campaign funds, but they are able -- in a way most other groups are not -- to explore the truth behind the jargon and distorted data and assumptions that sometimes cloud understanding of the new federal education law, No Child Left Behind.
An Education Trust team led by senior policy analyst Kevin Carey looked closely at what Wisconsin and other states had claimed for the quality of their teachers and produced their report, "Telling the Whole Truth (or Not) About Highly Qualified Teachers" (available at www2.edtrust.org/EdTrust/Press+Room/tell+the+truth.htm).
Sounds like the beginning of a sleep-inducing war of statistics, doesn't it. Some of you may be thinking at this point of abandoning this column for a quick look at washingtonpost.com's very fine coverage of the upcoming New Year's Day football games. But stick with me for a moment. If we are ever going to understand how this expensive new education law is supposed to work, we need to comprehend the Education Trust critique.
The new law is designed to improve public schools by requiring them to keep track of how their children are doing on standardized tests, and quantify other important matters such as how many of their teachers know what they are doing. An important byproduct of this system, at least in the minds of the Democratic and Republican legislators who created it, is to give parents and students who don't ordinarily have access to this data a chance to see what is going on. The highly qualified teacher statistic is particularly significant because teacher training, experience and subject matter expertise is one of the few things that we know affects learning in a big way.
The Education Trust team said they found a very wide range of responses in the state reports: "Some states appear to have taken the reporting provisions to heart, working hard to provide an honest accounting of where they are and where they need to improve. But others took a different track. Some states simply didn't report any data, citing an inability to gather even this most basic information. And some states seem to have used their discretion in interpreting the law to cross the line that separates fact from fiction, to paint a rosy picture that is simply at odds with reality."
The most prominent fairy tale alleged by the Education Trust was Wisconsin's declaration that it had the nation's best highly qualified teacher numbers. The Education Trust report said that if the state's figures were true, "we would encourage school leaders to rush to Wisconsin to learn from and emulate their exciting teacher production and retention strategies. Unfortunately, they're not. In fact, Wisconsin is currently one of a minority of states that have no subject matter testing requirements for new teachers at all."
The Education Trust noted that Wisconsin passed a law in 1999 that would require teachers to demonstrate that they knew the subject matter they were teaching, but it does not come into effect until August 2004. As we have seen in other states, tough education regulations that are supposed to click in at a future date are sometimes rewritten or delayed, and the Education Trust report criticized Wisconsin for acting as if it were already a year into the future.
The Wisconsin report to the federal government said that nearly every teacher had achieved the federal quality standard through an alternative means allowed in the new law, something called HOUSSE which stands for High Objective Uniform State Standard of Evaluation. HOUSSE was designed to give the states flexibility. If they did not want to give every teacher a test to prove they knew their stuff, they could with federal approval use some combination of experience, college coursework, special training or other state-determined measures.
The HOUSSE option has the appearance of a loophole, and the Education Trust said that was exactly the way Wisconsin used it. The state simply asserted that a Wisconsin teaching license was proof that the HOUSSE requirement had been met, because to get a license teachers had to complete "an approved program at a college or university, either in this state or in another state."
One can almost see the steam rising from the Education Trust report at this point, It said "in other words, Wisconsin has made the conceptual leap of equating the question of whether teachers have sufficient subject matter knowledge in the specific subject that they are actually teaching with the question of whether or not they have completed an accredited teacher education program in any subject area in any college or university in the United States of America."
Since the federal Schools And Staffing Survey indicates that 32 percent of licensed high school teachers in the country, and 20 percent of those in Wisconsin, did not major in the subject they are teaching, "this simply defied common sense," the Education Trust said.
The report said it found several other states that provided what it considered dubious definitions of a highly qualified teacher. Many of them, like Wisconsin, reported very high percentages of teachers in that category. Some used existing teacher evaluation systems that did not include an objective measure of subject matter knowledge. Some put heavy weight on how much experience a teacher had in the classroom, which is okay under the law but which, the Education Trust report said, risks leaving some teachers in the classroom without much evidence that they know what they are teaching.
The Education Trust also accused the U.S. Education Department going soft. A federal spokesperson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel nearly two months after the Wisconsin submitted its highly qualified teacher numbers that it wasn't clear yet if they were in compliance. Seven states, Louisiana, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina and Tennessee, missed the Sept. 1 deadline for teacher quality data, and so far the federal government does not appear to have complained. And Utah, after reporting that 95.9 percent of its teachers were highly qualified, added in a parenthesis that only 25 percent of teachers were "fully" highly qualified, while 71 percent had "interim" highly qualified status. To which the Education Trust report added, "whatever that is."
Many of the states that have been criticized by the report say they are doing the best they can with a very demanding new law. And Wisconsin officials insist their state standards already meet the new federal standards, and their number one ranking in percentage of highly qualified teachers is legitimate.
Joseph Donovan, spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, said "we do have high objective uniform state standards that have been in existence for over 30 years and have regularly been revised to keep pace with changes in educational standards. While Wisconsin does not have a subject specific state test, the colleges and universities of Wisconsin have always taken very seriously their responsibility to assure that Wisconsin's teachers have the content knowledge that they need to be effective teachers. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction staff regularly review these programs to verify they are meeting this responsibility. It is important to note that the new Wisconsin teacher certification rules that go into effect in 2004 will provide additional verification of educators' ability as all future teachers will take a state approved test in the content appropriate to the licensure they are seeking. "
Alan Ray, spokesman for the New York state education department, said the way they had been collecting teacher data did not match the latest federal definition, so instead of guessing at the right number, they told federal officials they would have to wait a year for them to survey school districts again.
Patrick Phillips, spokesman for the Maine education department, said the state was spending millions of dollars to create a new database system that would provide the right number, but, as they explained to the U.S. Education Department, it was not ready yet and could not provide the correct numbers until next spring. Kim Karesh of the Tennessee state education department said they were sorry to miss the deadline but their state data has since been submitted. New Jersey education department spokesman Jon Zlock said the state is working hard on its definition of a highly qualified teacher and has told the federal government its data will be ready by May.
Joan Patterson, coordinator of educator licensing for the Utah State Office of Education, said they had to use the makeshift "interim" classification in their Sept. 1 report because the state school board had not yet approved the state's definition of HOUSSE standards. That has since been done, she said, and future reports will be more definitive.
Figuring out which side is right in disputes over teacher qualifications takes a little time, but it seems to me a worthwhile discussion, since no one has ever tried before to get a firm grip on how many teachers lack sufficient knowledge of their subject matter. And whether the new demands for information under No Child Left Behind will do any good depends in large part on how many people care.
It is true, as the Education Trust says, that "obfuscation, denial and dishonesty" in reporting these numbers does people who care about schools "not a shred of good." But will we pay any attention?
For the last two decades we have had truckloads of data showing that a quarter of our schools were not teaching their students enough reading, writing and math to qualify for the jobs and college places they wanted. I don't think enough people took this seriously.
I welcome more reports by the Education Trust and others who have the time and patience to make these statistics comprehensible and real. I just hope more people read them this time. |
