Opinion
Education Letter to the Editor

We Can’t Legislate Teacher Quality

September 13, 2005 2 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

To the Editor:

Michael J. Petrilli argues that the No Child Left Behind Act will fail to improve teacher quality in our nation’s public schools because it was passed with watered-down provisions for ensuring that veteran teachers are “highly qualified” (“Improving Teacher Quality: Better Luck Next Time,” Commentary, Aug. 31, 2005).

Mr. Petrilli misses the point. The details of the No Child Left Behind law, its requirements for new teachers vs. older teachers, and so on, are irrelevant. You cannot legislate truly qualified teachers into the classroom, because the incentives for top-flight individuals to teach are simply not there.

If you have lax requirements, you get poor teachers (the status quo). On the other hand, if you legislate strict requirements, you don’t get a highly qualified teaching force, but rather a huge shortage of teachers.

Can we really expect our best and brightest to enter the profession and face a room full of needy kids for $25,000 a year, or maybe $50,000 after 20 years of service? While there are many wonderful, dedicated public school teachers out there, our current incentives have produced a teaching force that is woefully inadequate, and no act of Congress will remediate this.

My own experience is a classic example of why Mr. Petrilli’s argument is a red herring. I left a job in industry to teach in the public schools, taking a huge pay cut in the process. I worked for two years on an emergency credential.

As an engineer, I was certainly qualified to teach math, and I passed my content-area tests with flying colors. But the federal No Child Left Behind law effectively eliminated emergency credentials, so to remain a public school teacher I would have had to get a teaching credential by going to school at night and on weekends for two years while working full time at my high school.

I might have been able to afford the time and money to do that if my salary had been higher. But it wasn’t, so I became a statistic. I left for a private school. They don’t require credentials and often pay better.

What’s the formula for getting highly qualified teachers into public schools? It’s simple. Pay them better, give them smaller classes, and toughen tenure requirements. If new teachers started at $50,000, increased to $90,000 after 15 years, and had to prove themselves for seven years, instead of two, to get tenure, our nation’s teaching corps would improve immeasurably, as good candidates competed for these jobs.

Instead, the politicians and pundits argue and place blame while our kids are very much left behind.

David H. Goldbrenner

San Francisco, Calif.

A version of this article appeared in the September 14, 2005 edition of Education Week as We Can’t Legislate Teacher Quality

Events

Jobs Virtual Career Fair for Teachers and K-12 Staff
Find teaching jobs and other jobs in K-12 education at the EdWeek Top School Jobs virtual career fair.
Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Education Briefly Stated: January 17, 2024
Here's a look at some recent Education Week articles you may have missed.
9 min read
Education In Their Own Words The Stories That Stuck With Us, 2023 Edition
Our newsroom selected five stories as among the highlights of our work. Here's why.
4 min read
102523 IMSE Reading BS
Adria Malcolm for Education Week
Education Opinion The 10 Most-Read Opinions of 2023
Here are Education Week’s most-read Opinion blog posts and essays of 2023.
2 min read
Collage of lead images for various opinion stories.
F. Sheehan for Education Week / Getty
Education Letter to the Editor EdWeek's Most-Read Letters of 2023
Read the most-read Letters to the Editor of the past year.
1 min read
Illustration of a line of diverse hands holding up speech bubbles in front of a subtle textured newspaper background
iStock/Getty