States Given Extra Year on Teachers

'Highly Qualified' delay has strings attached.

States and districts are going to get more breathing room to meet the federal mandate that teachers be “highly qualified,” but extending the deadline, teacher-quality advocates say, could ultimately bring more pressure on school officials to make progress.

That’s because the one-year reprieve dangled late last month by federal education officials is contingent on evidence that a state has been reordering its priorities and building the systems needed to take responsibility for the quality of its teaching force under the No Child Left Behind Act. The deal also requires a state to map out how it intends to move forward and then subject that map to the scrutiny of federal officials.

In an Oct. 21 letter to chief state school officers, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said that officials of her department would not necessarily yank funds from states that “do not quite reach the 100 percent goal” for highly qualified teachers—a goal set by the nearly 4-year-old No Child Left Behind law. Rather, she wrote, the Department of Education would apply a series of tests to decide whether states should...