A Marshall Plan for Teaching

What It Will Really Take to Leave No Child Behind

By Linda Darling-Hammond

Views about the No Child Left Behind Act are currently as divided as Berlin before the wall came down. But whatever one thinks about the 5-year-old federal law, it’s clear that developing more-skillful teaching is a sine qua non for attaining higher and more equitable achievement for students in the United States. Without teachers who have sophisticated skills for teaching challenging content to diverse learners, there is no way that children from all racial and ethnic, language, and socioeconomic backgrounds will reach the high academic standards envisioned by the law. For this reason, one of the most important aspects of the No Child Left Behind legislation is its demand for a “highly qualified” teacher for every child.

Research indicates that expert teachers are the most important—and the most inequitably distributed—school resource. In the United States, however, schools serving more than 1 million of our highest-need students are staffed by a parade of underprepared and inexperienced teachers who know little about effective instruction, and even less about teaching English-language learners and students with disabilities. Many of these teachers enter the classroom with little training and leave soon after, creating greater instability in their wake. Meanwhile, affluent students receive teachers who are typically better prepared than their predecessors, further widening the achievement gap.

Some argue that this long-standing condition is not really a problem—that the revolving door of unprepared entrants is plenty good enough for the students in poor schools. This argument was made again this past November by the Hoover Institution, which published an article by researchers Thomas J. Kane, Jonah E. Rockoff, and Douglas O. Staiger looking at teachers’ pathways into the New York City public schools. The study found that, while uncertified and alternatively certified teachers initially did less well than certified teachers in producing student achievement, especially in reading, most of the differences in student performance disappeared by the third year of teaching. Therefore, the article concluded, we need not worry about teacher training and certification for the...