NCLB Teacher Rules Unevenly Enforced, Major Study Finds

Although some 90 percent of teachers may be considered "highly qualified'' under the teacher-quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, varying state definitions of what counts as highly qualified mean that skilled teachers likely remain unevenly distributed among the nation's classrooms, according to a large-scale federal study released today .

"I think the high compliance rate suggests there were states that set the bar low and, in a way, grandfathered in a lot of teachers,'' said Kerstin Carlson Le Floch, one of the primary authors of the study, which was conducted for the U.S. Department of Education by the Washington-based American Institutes for Research and the RAND Corp. of Santa Monica, Calif.

"To get the real story," she added, "you have to look below the surface, where...