Public Advocates, a group that has sued the federal government before over NCLB, is suing over NCLB again. This time over having a "highly qualified teachers" mandate, but allowing loopholes in the regulatory scheme that does not mandate that a highly qualified teacher is actually in every room. Here is the SF Chron story on the suit which was filed in the Federal District Court in San Francisco.
Sometimes it is easy to forget the Department of Education has to take flack from both sides. Here is a good example. Ask any teacher or administrator out there and they would attack NCLB and its Highly Qualified Teacher requirement for being unreasonably harsh, but there are those out there that will always attack for being not tough enough.
This is also an example of political language causing problems. Who doesn't want a "highly qualified" teacher in their child's classroom? But, just because a teacher has yet to meet the HQT demand does not mean that person is a bad or unqualified teacher. If schools could easily comply, this language would not be a problem. However, when the requirement is a difficult to achieve goal which will take years to comply with, such as HQT, the language causes schools problems when they physically cannot meet it, despite their best efforts. But, because of the language, groups like Public Advocates can garner press attention and play on the emotions of parents. That seems to be a big part of what is happening with this lawsuit.
On a related note, there was a really interesting article in the NY Times (registration required) about teacher turnover with the retirement of the babyboomers and the high dropout rate of young teachers.
And, just to show you this is a not just a New York and LA problem:
In Kansas, Alexa Posny, the state’s education commissioner, said
the schools had been working to fill “the largest number of vacancies”
the state had ever faced. This is partly because of baby boomer
retirements and partly because districts in Texas and elsewhere were
offering recruitment bonuses and housing allowances, luring Kansas
teachers away.“This is an acute problem that is becoming a crisis,” Ms. Posny said.
“The problem is not mainly with retirement,” said Thomas G.
Carroll, the president of the National Commission on Teaching and
America’s Future. “Our teacher preparation system can accommodate the
retirement rate. The problem is that our schools are like a bucket with
holes in the bottom, and we keep pouring in teachers.”
The commission has calculated that these days nearly a third of all new
teachers leave the profession after just three years, and that after
five years almost half are gone — a higher turnover rate than in the
past.All the coming and going of young teachers is tremendously
disruptive, especially to schools in poor neighborhoods where teacher
turnover is highest and students’ needs are greatest.
According to the most recent Department of Education statistics
available, about 269,000 of the nation’s 3.2 million public school
teachers, or 8.4 percent, quit the field in the 2003-4 school year.
Thirty percent of them retired, and 56 percent said they left to pursue
another career or because they were dissatisfied.The federal
No Child Left Behind law requires schools and districts to put a
qualified teacher in every classroom. The law has led districts to
focus more seriously on staffing its low-performing schools, educators
said, but it does not appear to have helped persuade veteran teachers
to continue their service in them.Tim Daly, president of the
New Teacher Project, a group that helps urban districts recruit
teachers, said attrition often resulted from chaotic hiring practices,
because novice teachers are often assigned at the last moment to
positions for which they have not even interviewed. Later, overwhelmed
by classroom stress, many leave the field.
It would be great to put a "highly qualified" teacher in every classroom, but first perhaps we better put our effort to just putting a teacher in every classroom.