Good News, Bad News About Teachers

We have a good news-bad news report about teachers from the Department of Education and the American Institutes for Research.

The good news is that most public school teachers are "highly qualified" under the terms of NCLB. The bad news is that not enough of the highly
qualified teachers are where we need them most. In Teacher Quality Under NCLB: Interim Report, AIR concludes that 90 percent of teachers are highly qualified under NCLB standards. Here's the bad news laid out. Frequent readers of this blog will not be surprised:

A higher percentage of teachers who are not highly qualified under NCLB teach special education, limited English proficiency classes and in middle schools, as well as in high-poverty and high-minority schools. Even among teachers considered highly qualified, the teachers in
high-poverty schools had less experience and were less likely to have a degree in the subject they taught.

Here are some details.

• Teachers who were not highly qualified were three times more likely to be teaching in high-minority schools than in low-minority schools (7 percent compared with 2 percent).
• Highly qualified teachers in high-poverty and high-minority schools were more likely to have three or fewer years of experience than were highly qualified teachers in low-poverty and low-minority schools.
• A majority of districts had difficulty attracting highly qualified applicants in special education (57 percent), mathematics (60 percent), and science (65 percent).
• In mathematics and science the percentage of high-minority districts that struggled to attract and retain highly qualified applicants was nearly double that of low-minority districts.

This is not satisfactory. This is not okay. This can't go on.