NCLB Flops on HQT Goals

One of No Child Left Behind's major selling points was that there needed to be stricter teacher qualification standards - that America needed "Highly Qualified Teachers."

One of No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) major selling points was that there needed to be stricter teacher qualification standards - that America needed "Highly Qualified Teachers." The law establishes new, tougher guidelines about who can teach what and what kind of training and experience a teacher needs to teach core academic areas like math and social studies.

The Boston Globe this morning is reporting that all 50 states will fail to meet the law's Highly Qualified Teacher (HQT) goals. At least nine states have done badly enough that the will incur penalties under the law. On that list: Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Washington, as well as both Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. Another 12 states (including both Virginia, where I live, and West Virginia, where I teach) are still under review regarding penalties.

So the question becomes, "Are the standards set by NCLB realistic?" When the law was proposed many of its accountability and quality control ideas seemed idealistic - an effort to achieve a perfect educational world. Now more and more they simply appear to be extreme and not well thought out.

Special education has become a prime example of the problem. NCLB wants a teacher who works with students who have learning disabilities to be qualified in that disabilities area. But then the law also wants the teacher to eventually be certified in the content area they teach, just like a general education teacher. The result has been that special education teachers all over the country are either

• Ignoring the law (which means that eventually their school districts will have to declare them to be unqualified despite their expertise in dealing with disabilities)
• Or taking on the burden of additional certification programs and pay (often out of their own pocket) to go back to college and obtain additional credentials that don't always come with any pay or salary advantage.

In the middle and high school setting where special education teachers have traditional taught several core subjects during the course of a day, this can means that a special education teacher needs to be certified in learning disabilities, mentally impaired, middle school math, middle school social studies, middle school science and middle school language arts all at once to teach at a small school that can't afford to have a different special education teacher for each subject. (I recent look at obtaining certification in middle school math and discovered that it will take me about two years of part time college work).

On "solution" has been to push students with learning disabilities out of special education classes and back into a general education reading or math class. That way a school can say that the child is being taught those core subjects by someone who is highly qualified (even if that math or English teacher knows almost nothing about disabilities). The special education teacher can, of course, be in the room with the general education teacher and the disabled student - if the special education teacher's schedule allows that. But often the schedule doesn't allow for that.

Is the situation likely to get any better? No for special education. President Bush is planning to shrink back even further from meeting the federal funding burden for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in the next budget cycle...