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November 2004 | Number 39
NCLB and Teachers

Does Highly Qualified Mean High-Quality?

Scott Emerick, Eric Hirsch and Barnett Berry

While national attention has been riveted on the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), few in the education community have focused on what matters most to ensure that all students make adequate yearly progress—a high-quality teacher.

Research tells us what educators have long known: teaching quality is the essential component to raising student achievement. The critical question is whether NCLB and its “highly qualified” teacher provisions—in statute, nonregulatory guidance, state reaction, and, most importantly, implementation in classrooms throughout the country—will lead to the recruitment, retention, and continued support of quality teachers. (See What Constitutes “Highly Qualified.”)

NCLB holds the promise to address longtime barriers that have hampered efforts to recruit and retain teachers, especially in schools serving poor and minority students. The law's highly qualified requirements correctly target schools serving the most disadvantaged students, first by requiring states to ensure that poor and minority students are not taught at higher rates than other children by inexperienced, unqualified, or out-of-field teachers.

The federal focus on highly qualified teachers also has the potential to drive new state and local actions. This focus has prompted universities to prepare teachers more effectively, school districts to create more effective professional development programs, local administrators to implement new recruitment and retention strategies, and teachers to think and act differently with regard to their own profession.

Unfortunately, this promise remains unfulfilled, according to research conducted by the Southeast Center for Teaching Quality (SECTQ) in 24 schools in 12 districts located in four southeastern states (Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee).¹  NCLB's narrow emphasis on content knowledge has driven states to lower standards for teachers. Additionally, the lack of sufficient financial and technical assistance leaves districts, on which successful implementation hinges, struggling to meet the law's requirements.

This brief will highlight three major findings from SECTQ's teacher surveys and interviews with more than 160 educators entitled Unfulfilled Promise: Ensuring High Quality Teachers for Our Nation's Students. It will also profile two districts' approaches to meeting the requirements of NCLB and make recommendations for federal, state, and local efforts that will ensure we have not only a highly qualified teacher, but also high-quality teaching in every classroom every day.

“Highly Qualified” Does Not Ensure High Quality

Although the letter of the law promotes the idea that highly qualified teachers both know their subject matter and know how to teach it effectively, leaders in the U.S. Department of Education have chosen to emphasize content knowledge and give little attention to instructional practice. In the July 2003 Second Annual Report on Teacher Quality, Secretary of Education Rod Paige focuses on two principles: requiring teachers to pass standardized tests of content knowledge and lowering barriers to the profession.

In contrast, many teachers and administrators interviewed by SECTQ said that content knowledge alone is insufficient for a teacher to merit the label of highly qualified. They called for additional emphasis on skills such as understanding the developmental stages of student learning, using multiple types of student assessment data, and revising instruction on a daily basis.

Because of this stark difference between the federal definition of highly qualified and educators' views of high-quality teaching, during the interviews, many teachers mentioned “false positives” and “false negatives” in assigning highly qualified status. “I've checked more than 500 transcripts, and I can assure you that some who have met the definition are not some of our best and brightest,” reported one human resources administrator.

Other factors are also contributing to the divide between highly qualified and high quality:

• NCLB considers participants from a variety of alternative certification programs highly qualified, despite the lack of preparation many of these teachers receive before they enter the classroom. Although NCLB requires mentoring of alternative candidates, SECTQ found schools and districts unprepared to offer the kind of intensive induction and high quality, sustained, classroom-focused professional development opportunities discussed in the law and needed by these teachers.
• Demonstrating content knowledge is difficult and the standard varies. Most states rely on subject matter tests; but although these tests offer a standardized measure, they only assess minimal competency at best. The passing scores also differ among states, so a teacher may be highly qualified in one state and not another. The high, objective, uniform state standard of evaluation requirements within NCLB—designed to help veteran teachers demonstrate highly qualified status—was described by one administrator as “a quality loophole large enough to run a truck through.” These strategies leave school administrators scrambling to have teachers pass multiple-choice, content tests and take university classes, which often have limited relevance to classroom teaching.
• In an effort to align state licensing standards with highly qualified requirements, states have backtracked on performance-based standards and teacher preparation. In Georgia, for example, teachers with a degree, a grade point average of 2.5, and a major in a related field who pass the state's three required Praxis assessments will get a five-year license that becomes renewable upon district recommendation.² 

Hard-to-Staff Solutions Are Hard to Find

The case studies revealed urban and rural schools struggling to recruit the highly qualified teachers required by NCLB. In one elementary school SECTQ visited, only 20 percent of the teachers are fully licensed, and only 8 percent have an advanced degree. Over 85 percent of the teachers grew up in or near the town, and the school's annual turnover rate hovers close to 30 percent. Even with its additional NCLB Title II, Part A funds, a school like this will have difficulty competing effectively in the teacher labor market.

Districts, without the capacity or know-how to attempt new, innovative approaches to recruiting and retaining teachers—approaches that focus on many of the root causes of turnover, such as teacher working conditions, leadership, autonomy, and support—have invested in salary supplements and signing bonuses. (See Recruitment Incentives.) Although this compensation may be necessary, it will not sufficiently solve the staffing problems of the districts SECTQ visited for its study. One rural district in Alabama offered a $5,000 signing bonus for any person, including principals, teachers, and administrative staff, willing to work there. Central office staff for the district reported that they could only require recipients to work two years if they wanted to ensure that the bonus worked. Ultimately, many of the teachers take the bonus, serve their two years, and leave.

Most administrators who participated in the study did not know how to recruit highly qualified candidates in a competitive marketplace and often had to draw from pools of teachers who were not well prepared to work with limited resources and students with dramatically different learning and emotional needs. In the end, because NCLB considers alternatively licensed teachers highly qualified, administrators reported that they would continue to rely heavily on these underprepared educators. With few exceptions, principals and teachers said that NCLB has had little effect on the quality of the teacher pool as a whole, district assignment policies, or strategies to recruit and retain new teachers.

Using the Same Approaches Will Lead to the Same Results

Implementing the NCLB highly qualified mandates requires considerable commitment and resources from states and districts to prove teachers' content knowledge, to track the status of highly qualified teachers and communicate this information to the public, and to recruit highly qualified teachers. The administrators interviewed believed that the federal government could reduce the burden on states and districts by providing clearer, more consistent guidance and more timely technical assistance.

This lack of assistance has led to several issues identified by teachers, principals, and district administrators:

• Nearly two years after passing the law, many questions still exist regarding the gray areas of the highly qualified provisions, including deciding which higher education courses should count toward academic requirements; understanding highly qualified requirements for teaching core subjects to special education students; communicating with parents regarding highly qualified status; and understanding the potential punitive elements of the law for failing to meet the mandate.
• Few states and districts are equipped to handle the data collection and reporting related to highly qualified status or the availability of access to high-quality professional development. District leaders spoke of numerous hours spent pouring over paper files; searching for copies of transcripts; and asking teachers to search for documentation that might be 20 years old. This has led to great variation across states in the accuracy of highly qualified information, and, more important, the ability to communicate to teachers how they measured up to the highly qualified status. In one-third of the schools visited in the spring of 2004, at least 30 percent of the teachers did not know their highly qualified status.
• Little has been done to change professional development. Overall, few interviewees were knowledgeable about the law's high-quality professional development provisions and few efforts to create new opportunities. Administrators also expressed serious concern that the emphasis on scientifically based professional development would result in canned programs sold by a favored vendor. Teachers worried that in using federal funds for only scientifically based opportunities, it would eliminate teacher leadership roles and allow few opportunities to attend one-day, short-term training to help them understand standards, curriculum, and accountability.

The Best and Worst of NCLB Implementation

Most urban and rural school districts SECTQ visited in the Southeast struggled, even with additional NCLB funds, to compete in teacher labor markets. New flexibility in using Title II dollars theoretically allows for innovative strategies to recruit and retain high-quality teachers; however, most districts lack the visionary thinking, appropriate funding, adequate time, meaningful guidance, and technical assistance needed to use federal monies differently and transform teacher recruitment and retention practices. The following case studies represent the best and worst scenarios for districts responding to the NCLB teaching quality requirements.

Best Case Scenario: A Sustained Effort to Recruit and Retain Quality Teachers

Despite the challenges in recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers, SECTQ discovered that a few districts were making exemplary progress. Unfortunately, these districts proved the exception rather than the rule and were all large, urban districts with significant local resources to invest in teacher quality initiatives.

One particular large urban district had moved beyond the reliance of signing bonuses to attract teachers and focused its resources on its hardest-to-staff schools. This district provided a comprehensive menu of recruitment incentives and improved teacher working conditions for both novice and veteran teachers. The district offered teachers long-term support through effective learning, leadership, and development opportunities.

Unlike many less-successful efforts, this exemplary district considered how multiple incentives could be combined to provide the greatest impetus for attracting and retaining the most accomplished teachers to the area's nine lowest-performing schools. The district provides a host of financial incentives to educators in these schools, including

• Free tuition toward a master's degree.
• A $10,000 loan toward a down payment on a house near eligible schools, forgivable if the teacher remains in the school for a minimum of five years.
• $2,000 for every teacher that boosts overall test scores by a significant degree.
• A $5,000 annual bonus for all participating teachers.

The program design also places incoming teachers at these schools with cohort groups of highly accomplished teachers within in the same school to ensure effective teacher support. The culture at these previously low-performing schools has been dramatically redefined to focus more attention on student success and teacher working conditions.

As a result of these recruiting efforts, staffing vacancies in these schools have decreased dramatically, the applicant pool of teachers is noticeably stronger, and student achievement rates are improving. Parents and community members are recognizing the relationship between improving teaching quality and realizing higher student achievement gains.

This effort predates NCLB's highly qualified teacher requirements, but the district used NCLB to sustain momentum and bring additional resources to an effort already in place and focused broadly on addressing recruitment and retention challenges. The district emphasized quality rather than meeting the mandates of NCLB, recognizing teaching quality as a core element of its school improvement strategies and analyzing how local, state, and federal resources could collectively enhance efforts to improve and track teaching quality efforts. As one district leader described, “We had already spent significant time talking about and beginning work on addressing teaching quality in the district. Did NCLB speed up the time table for implementing some of our efforts? Certainly.”

The financial incentives provided by this district were largely possible through a multimillion-dollar grant from several local foundations. Like this district, the few other districts that SECTQ found to be currently making considerable progress with teaching quality efforts benefit from leadership, resources, and community support beyond the scope of what NCLB provides. Although this best-case scenario demonstrates that innovative responses to teaching quality mandates are possible, they also highlight the need for more guidance and greater resources than most rural districts currently receive. (See Lessons for Improving Teacher Quality.)

Worst Case Scenario: Capacity and Expertise Barriers too Great to Overcome

For a severely isolated rural district (nearly 90 miles from the nearest metropolitan area and major university) that has over 90 percent of its student population on free and reduced lunch, the application of the NCLB teaching quality mandates looks incredibly different than the urban district benefiting from foundation, business, and community support as described in the previous case study. An administrator in this rural case study described the obstacle facing her district: “NCLB and the definition for teaching quality left a lot of systems behind. People writing the law may have considered some rural areas, but not our kind of rural area . . . with almost no parental involvement or community resources.”

The human resources administrator primarily responsible for overseeing the district's response to NCLB's requirements reported participating in a single one-day workshop from the state department of education to prepare for the process of identifying highly qualified teachers. This administrator's experience proved symptomatic of the general lack of training and guidance provided to the district. Despite the need and desire to think differently about recruiting and retaining highly qualified teachers, the district was using Title II monies the same as before the law passed (when it was Class Size Reduction and Eisenhower Science and Math Professional Development funds), focusing mostly on pre-existing professional development.

Without the innovative application of Title II or state funding, the district has been unable to invest sufficiently in the recruitment and support of teachers to ensure a highly qualified teaching corps. Central office personnel said they were forced to draw from Title II teaching quality funds to compensate for recent budget cuts and, consequently, had even fewer dollars to fund innovative recruitment strategies. Administrators in the district lacked the time, guidance, and expertise to recruit teachers differently. But even if elements to develop an innovative recruitment and retention plan were present, the district would still lack necessary resources to implement the strategies.

Given the realities of current teacher recruitment efforts, the district has been forced to rely heavily on alternative certification teachers and others with less preparation and classroom experience. Administrators and teachers believe that most alternative and traditional preparation experiences available to candidates coming to their schools failed to adequately prepare them for the realities of this district. One teacher in an elementary school in this district explained, “Before I began teaching, I needed more in-field experience and less textbook theories. I needed them to put me in the classroom with a group of tough kids and show me what to do. What little I learned was more about a textbook fairy-tale classroom . . . I was shocked when I started teaching.”

Like the case in many rural districts visited, this district has no way to provide quality preparation and support for the significant number of alternative-route educators. Teachers described scattershot induction and mentoring efforts that were no different for alternatively certified, traditionally certified, or relocating experienced teachers. The district lacks the resources and capacity to move toward comprehensive induction models proven effective for supporting novice teachers.

The geographic isolation also creates considerable challenges for the district and its efforts to bring in outside experts who were knowledgeable about induction and professional development and who had expertise in subject areas such as math and science. The district lacks the technological know-how to provide many teachers with distance learning opportunities, and the small size of the district made paying travel and delivery fees for reputable external vendors cost prohibitive. Many teachers said they would be unwilling to travel the 90 miles to the nearest university to take courses that would meet the highly qualified content knowledge requirements. (For suggestions on how to maneuver through the challenges of NCLB requirements, see Avoiding Pitfalls of Implementing NCLB Teaching Requirements, p. 6.)

Recommendations

From the Capitol to the classroom, much needs to be done to ensure that NCLB helps all students have access to the knowledgeable teachers they need and deserve.

Federal Government

NCLB represents an unprecedented role for the federal government in educating children in the United States. This new role requires clear and consistent guidance and assistance to states, as well as sufficient funding to ensure districts can meet the requirements.

• NCLB must be amended to focus not only on teachers' content knowledge but also on their ability to teach it by requiring preparation and performance-based assessment before a teacher is considered highly qualified.
• Title II allocations, like many state funding formulas, should include additional monies to ensure that small rural districts have sufficient funds to recruit and retain highly qualified teachers.
• The Medical Manpower Act of the 1950s and the Health Professions Education Assistance Act in 1963 demonstrated a significant investment in and comprehensive response to shortages in the medical field, creating preparation programs and incentives to work in hard-to-staff areas of the United States. A similar commitment is necessary for teachers. Proposed legislation such as the Teacher Mentoring Act (H.R. 1611), Teaching Fellows Act (H.R. 1805), and aspects of the Ready to Teach Act (H.R. 2211) that create centers of excellence, if passed, could be a good start toward the long-term investment necessary to assist states and districts in finding high-quality teachers.

State Government

States play a critical role in ensuring teaching quality, setting standards for the profession, and developing licensing requirements. State policies and NCLB requirements must work together rather than against each other.

• States should use the minimal requirements of the federal highly qualified definition only as a starting point for discussions on what teaching quality looks like, how to assess it, and how to prepare new candidates and support existing teachers to reach the highest standards. States should not offer reciprocity to highly qualified teachers from other states without a thorough analysis to ensure that those standards are of equal rigor.
• Districts need assistance in developing new policies and programs to improve teaching quality and the implementation of NCLB. State assistance to schools and districts should ensure that innovative and successful approaches are thoroughly detailed, best practices are systematically shared, and assistance in implementation is provided.
• States need to invest strategically in a combination of incentives to recruit and retain teachers for hard-to-staff and low-performing schools. These programs should include building a critical mass of accomplished teachers in these schools, offering intensive induction programs, and creating better working conditions (more time for teachers, leadership opportunities, professional development opportunities, and so on).
• States should collect and report more comprehensive data on a range of teacher recruitment, preparation, and professional development efforts, as well as teacher working conditions, to assess progress on building a high-quality teacher development system.

Local School Districts

Ultimately, the success of NCLB's efforts to place a highly qualified teacher in every classroom falls squarely on local districts that control virtually all the federal educator quality funds.

• Districts must first understand how local, state, and federal dollars used to enhance teaching quality are being spent. They must then analyze current practices to determine what, if any, reforms are necessary.
• Districts need to focus on addressing recruitment and retention challenges with an emphasis on quality, not on simply meeting state and federal mandates. By focusing on teaching quality—recruiting and developing well-prepared teachers and investing in their continued professional growth—districts will meet the highly qualified requirements within NCLB.
• Districts must place teaching quality at the center of school improvement strategies if they expect schools to make adequate yearly progress. Data on teacher supply, demand, and turnover will be essential to monitoring the success of these strategies.

In the end, it will take a concerted and coordinated effort of the federal government, states, and local districts in the careful overhaul of the way teachers are recruited, licensed, inducted, and supported to ensure that students have not only a highly qualified teacher, but also high quality teaching in every classroom, every day.

Copyright © 2004 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development