Reporting on Teacher Quality

Abstract

Secretary of Education Rod Paige's report to Congress on the status of teacher quality in the nation, Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge, was released to the public in early June 2002 (U.S. Department of Education, 2002). This is the first of the annual reports on teacher quality that are now required as per the reauthorization of Title II of the Higher Education Act (HEA) in 1998, which also requires states to report annually on the quality of teacher preparation programs, which in turn depends on institutional reporting to states on the qualifications of all teacher candidates recommended for certification. Although the report is worth a thorough read, its conclusion is perfectly captured by its heading, A Broken System, in the executive summary: Schools of education and formal teacher training programs are failing to produce the types of highly qualified teachers that the No Child Left Behind Act demands (U.S. Department of Education, 2002, p. viii). The report argues that states' academic standards for teachers are low, whereas the barriers that keep out qualified prospective teachers who have not completed collegiate teacher preparation are high. The report concludes that states must transform certification requirements, basing their programs on rigorous academic content, eliminating cumbersome requirements not based on scientific evidence, and doing more to attract highly qualified candidates from a variety of fields (U.S. Department of Education, 2002, p. viii). The report also argues that alternate route programs are the model option for fixing the broken system which, if widely implemented, would solve the teacher quality and teacher supply problems simultaneously. There are a number of ways to respond to the secretary's report, some more visceral than others. I suggest in this editorial that four critiques are essential: an empirical critique, a conceptual critique, a social justice critique, and a political critique. An Empirical Critique The secretary's report is clear in its conclusions about what does and does not count in high-quality teaching: summary, we have found that rigorous research indicates that verbal ability and content knowledge are the most important attributes of highly qualified teachers. In addition there is little evidence that education school coursework leads to improved student achievement (U.S. Department of Education, 2002, p. 19). One major problem with the secretary's report is that many of its conclusions differ fundamentally from those of other reviews of research on teacher preparation, including the recent, widely circulated synthesis of research on teacher preparation by Wilson, Floden, and Ferrini-Mundy (2001), which was funded by the U.S. Department of Education through the Center for Teaching and Policy at the University of Washington and summarized in the previous issue of JTE (Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2002). Heap (2002) explicitly notes the discrepancy between the secretary's report and the Wilson synthesis. Heap points out that unlike the secretary's report, the Wilson synthesis concludes that: the often-claimed link between college study of subject matter and teaching quality is not so clear; there is evidence that teacher education does contribute to teaching quality; and, alternate route studies are inconclusive because of completely inconsistent definitions of traditional and alternative. The secretary's report also makes no mention of other syntheses and empirical studies (although published in reputable peer-reviewed journals) that conclude that there are teacher qualifications (in addition to subject matter knowledge and verbal ability) that are related to student achievement. These qualifications include: knowledge of teaching and learning gained through teacher preparation courses and experiences, teaching experience, and teacher certification status (e. …