"Progressive" Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa) has gone reformy.
Jason Stanford, at Huffington Post, Nov. 6, 2013
Is your child's teacher highly qualified? Thanks to a loophole snuck
into the bill to end the federal government shutdown, there's really no
way of knowing.
Here's how it's supposed to work: Under No Child Left Behind, all
schools -- even the ones where the poor and minority students go -- are
supposed to hire "highly qualified teachers." If a school hires teachers
who don't meet the federal definition of "highly qualified," they send
letters home to parents about their kids' substandard teachers and come
up with a plan to fix it.
This is a great idea. It used to be that inexperienced teachers would
get stuck with the hardest jobs in underfunded, underperforming
schools. As teachers would gain seniority, they would take their
experience to better schools where the kids were easier to teach. NCLB
recognized that the worst schools couldn't get better without "highly
qualified" teachers.
Unfortunately for Teach for America, their graduates didn't qualify.
Teach for America recruits smart college kids to teach in poor
communities for two years. TFA gives them five weeks of training after
graduation and places them in front of a classroom by the fall with only
15-20 hours of teaching experience under their belts.
Having our kids taught by someone with minimal experience and
training is not what parents have in mind when they imagine a "highly
qualified teacher," and it's certainly not what NCLB required. So
Congress did what Congress does, and created a solution that made the
problem worse by allowing teachers still enrolled in training to be
classified as "highly qualified." That way, when schools hire TFA grads
they don't have to let parents know their kids' teachers are barely
trained, inexperienced, and unproven.
Putting someone with 20 hours of classroom experience on the same
level as someone with National Board Certification in Teaching is like
thinking a 15-year-old with a learner's permit and an adult with a
commercial driver's license along with school bus and passenger endorsements
are equally qualified to drive the school bus. Only one of those
options will get you reliably good results, but congress says there's no
problem entrusting your children with the riskier option.
This loophole has been a disaster in California, which
tracked
where teachers-in-training got placed. Predictably, these inexperienced
teachers were more likely to find jobs in schools with low-income,
minority students. Shockingly, half of the teachers-in-training were
saddled with students with disabilities. Sticking the hardest-to-teach
kids with the least-qualified teachers was exactly what NCLB wanted to
prevent, so California recently created new rules to keep these rookie
teachers away from non-English speaking students.
TFA touts a new Mathematica
study that says their teachers are effective at getting results in middle-school math, but most
evidence points to the conclusion that TFA alums don't do as well as credentialed teachers. More recently, the
National Education Policy Center
found that "class size reduction has 286% more impact than TFA." And a
meta-study published in Teachers College Record reported that Pre-K
showed improvements 1214 percent larger than what the Mathematica study
showed.
Dozens
of national, state, and local civil rights, disability, parent,
student, community and education groups -- basically, everyone who
represents the kids who get the teachers-in-training -- lobbied congress
and the Obama administration to close the loophole. But Sen. Tom
Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who chairs the Senate Education Committee,
likes Teach for America and
worked
behind the scenes to use the bill to end the government shutdown as a
Trojan Horse to keep the loophole open, according to Stephanie Simon at
POLITICO. And Pres. Barack Obama, whose administration provided TFA with
12 percent of its funding in 2011, let it happen.
A better option would seem to be to invest in proven reforms such as
Pre-K and smaller class sizes, to expand financial aid for college
graduates to get certified as teachers, and to stop playing political
games with the definition of "highly qualified".
But what do I know? I'm just a dad with two kids in public schools. No one tells me anything.
