Teaching and California’s Future: The Status of the Teaching Profession 2007
Over the past five school years, California has reduced by nearly a third the number of its teachers who are not adequately prepared to teach, but the state still lacks a coherent system to improve teacher quality, concludes a report by the Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning.
The report estimates that there were 42,000 underprepared teachers in California in the 2000-01 school year, compared with about 15,000 in 2006-07, a reduction from 14 percent of the state’s teacher workforce to 5 percent.
But, the report adds, the gains in the supply of qualified teachers also mask problems, such as the fact that poor and minority students are still much more likely to have an underprepared teacher than their white peers, and low-achieving schools continue to face significant challenges in hiring qualified teachers.
