Federal

States Criticized on Standards for Veteran Teachers

By Linda Jacobson — January 04, 2005 | Corrected: February 22, 2019 3 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Corrected: The story cited the wrong location for the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. It is based in Washington. In trying to correct that information in the Feb. 2 issue, the newspaper inadvertently gave a wrong location for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. It is in Arlington, Va.

States may be demanding high standards of their newly certified teachers, but they’re doing a poor job of requiring their veteran teachers to get the training necessary to meet the “highly qualified” provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, according to a new assessment of states’ progress.

“Searching the Attic: How States Are Responding to the Nation’s Goal of Placing a Highly Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom” is available online from the National Council on Teacher Quality. ()

While there are a few exceptions, most states are either exempting veteran teachers from any coursework or asking them to complete activities that have little connection to the subjects they teach, according to the study, released last month by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based organization that advocates the elimination of bureaucratic obstacles that keep talented people from teaching.

“Most states neither share the urgency nor the single-minded focus of the U.S. Congress in seeking to address the low academic standards required of American teachers, arguably the least rigorous among all developed nations,” the report says, adding that many states don’t have the “political stomach for remedying the impact of substandard, expired certification regulations.”

‘Searching the Attic’

The report, which follows the group’s first study, released last spring, grades states’ plans for addressing the HOUSSE—or “high objective uniform state standard of evaluation”—provisions of the federal law that relate to experienced teachers.

Five states—Alabama, Hawaii, Kansas, Maryland, and Pennsylvania—require all teachers, regardless of how long they’ve been teaching, to have at least a college minor in the subjects they teach. They each received a B or a B-plus in the report.

“Though their standard falls short of NCLB’s goal of an academic major for all levels of teaching, this group of states offers a pragmatic response that other states should consider,” the report says.

Thirty states offer teachers a menu, allowing them to acquire points for professional-development activities or serving on a committee. In fact, the report’s title, “Searching the Attic,” is drawn from the image of teachers rummaging through old papers looking for evidence that they participated in some qualifying activity in the past.

“The insistence that ‘there is more to teaching than subject-matter knowledge’ has often been taken to an illogical extreme, resulting in too many certified teachers who are inadequately prepared to teach their core discipline in the classroom,” the authors write.

Colorado received an A-plus for being the only state to require all teachers to either pass tests in the subjects they teach or take the number of courses close to earning a major.

“When it comes to embracing the spirit of NCLB, not just the letter, Colorado’s program does exactly that,” the report says.

Eight states—California, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia—received F’s, mostly for allowing teachers too many options that are unrelated to subject knowledge.

But the authors—Kate Walsh, the president of the council, and Emma Snyder, a researcher with the council—don’t place all the responsibility on the states for disappointing performance. Congress, the report says, should “revisit the structure of the highly qualified teacher provision.”

And the U.S. Department of Education, they recommend, should be clear that a major is no less than 30 credit hours, and a minor no less than 15.

Other definitions of a highly qualified teacher, the report says, could include certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, or a passing score on a test offered by the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence. Alternative-certification programs are a strategy supported by the council, which helped to found the ABCTE.

With the deadline for states having “highly qualified” teachers just a year away, the council’s report is the latest to weigh in on that aspect of the law.

Tom Carroll, the president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a nonprofit group in Arlington, Va., working to improve teacher preparation and make the teaching profession more rewarding, said the report suggests that states and Congress might be missing a prime opportunity to improve the quality of the teaching workforce. But he said many questions remain about how unqualified teachers are distributed at the school level.

There is still too much emphasis placed on the “inputs” of teacher quality, such as certification and testing, he added. With progress being made in the area of “value added” research, he said, there should be more efforts to evaluate veteran teachers’ actual performance.

A version of this article appeared in the January 05, 2005 edition of Education Week as States Criticized on Standards for Veteran Teachers

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

Federal Biden Calls for Teacher Pay Raises, Expanded Pre-K in State of the Union
President Joe Biden highlighted a number of his education priorities in a high-stakes speech as he seeks a second term.
5 min read
President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol on March 7, 2024, in Washington.
President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol on March 7, 2024, in Washington.
Shawn Thew/Pool via AP
Federal Low-Performing Schools Are Left to Languish by Districts and States, Watchdog Finds
Fewer than half of district plans for improving struggling schools meet bare minimum requirements.
11 min read
A group of silhouettes looks across a grid with a public school on the other side.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week via Canva
Federal Biden Admin. Says New K-12 Agenda Tackles Absenteeism, Tutoring, Extended Learning
The White House unveiled a set of K-12 priorities at the start of an election year.
4 min read
U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona participates in a roundtable discussion with students from Dartmouth College on Jan. 10, 2024, on the school's campus, in Hanover, N.H.
U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona participates in a roundtable discussion with students from Dartmouth College on Jan. 10, 2024, on the school's campus, in Hanover, N.H.
Steven Senne/AP
Federal Lawmakers Want to Reauthorize a Major Education Research Law. What Stands in the Way?
Lawmakers have tried and failed to reauthorize the Education Sciences Reform Act over the past nearly two decades.
7 min read
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., left, joins Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., left, as Starbucks founder Howard Schultz answers questions about the company's actions during an ongoing employee unionizing campaign, at the Capitol in Washington, on March 29, 2023.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., left, joins Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., left, at the Capitol in Washington, on March 29, 2023. The two lawmakers sponsored a bill to reauthorize the Education Sciences Reform Act.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP