No Child Left Behind requires teachers be ‘highly qualified’
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Though she is a teacher in good standing, who has meet all the conditions required of her by Warren County Schools and the state Department of Education, she is not, by the federal government’s standards, “highly qualified.” And if she doesn’t become so by 2006, she will lose her job under the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Barnes is not alone. Across the United States, a number of teachers, including an estimated 20 percent of the Warren County teaching force, are not considered to be highly qualified under the sweeping federal law. To remedy this locally, Warren County Schools will soon begin a program to ensure full compliance with the federal mandate.
“These teachers are not bad teachers,” school system Director of Instruction Bobby Cox said of the teachers not meeting the federal standards, “they just don’t meet the definition of the federal law. We feel all Warren County teachers are doing their job – we see that by our test scores that they are performing at or above the state average and we feel good about that.”
With the aim of improving student achievement by improving teacher quality, No Child Left Behind requires all teachers teaching in core academic subjects be highly qualified by no later than the end of the 2005-2006 school year. Core academic subjects are English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history and geography.
Beginning last school year, all new teachers hired by the system must already have been deemed highly qualified in the areas in which they are to teach. Existing teachers, however, must become highly qualified through one of seven routes.
The most popular route for Warren County teachers has been by passing the NTE or Praxis exams, comprehensive exams in their subject areas. Some 60 percent of county teachers have meet the highly qualified standard by this route alone.
Other options include completing 24 college credit hours in the subject area taught, a graduate degree in content area, obtaining advanced certification such as being Nationally Board Certified, demonstrating competence through a state-devised evaluation program, having positive teacher effect data gained from TCAP tests and earning at least 100 points on a professional matrix, which awards points based on teaching experience, positive evaluations, professional leadership and staff development and the like.
This latter option, said Cox, will likely qualify about 20 percent of county teachers.
One of the system’s biggest problems, said Cox, will be in qualifying many of the county’s seventh and eighth grade teachers. Though they all have a kindergarten through eighth grade certification, under No Child Left Behind all teachers in grades seven through 12 must be certified to teach each of the subjects taught.
“At the high school most of our teachers have degrees in the subjects they teach whereas most of our K-6 teachers have either passed the test or have been in the classroom long enough to meet the requirements of the matrix,” he said. “Our seventh and eighth grade teachers will be our biggest focus area.”
Later next month school system officials will hold two information sessions for teachers in which they will describe to them how they can meet the highly qualified standard. By December, Cox said, officials should be able to identify all of the system’s areas of need and begin to draft specific remedies.
“We’re going to do everything in our power to identify and help the teachers who do not meet the federal government’s definition of highly qualified,” he said. “Our teachers are our greatest resource and we’re not going to let them fall through the cracks. We need to keep every teacher we have right now.”