Demanding vs. Doing
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web, July 26, 2006
The story of the No Child Left Behind
Act is all about the huge gap between setting standards and creating the
conditions in which those standards can be met. One of the law’s most
critical provisions requires that all public school teachers in core academic
courses be “highly qualified” by this year. But as The Times’s Sam Dillon
reported yesterday, not a single state has met the deadline.
The fault lies partly with the early appointees of the Bush administration who
controlled the Education Department when the law was passed. They
virtually ignored the teacher qualification provision, and the states got the
message that they could follow the bad old status quo as long as they wished.
Happily, the current education secretary, Margaret Spellings, appears to be
taking the law at its word. She recently required states to submit plans
showing how they would supply impoverished students with qualified and more
experienced teachers.
But changing the teacher preparation and assignment systems as they stand today
will be far more difficult than compiling the reports. The states fought
tooth and nail when Congress first approached the teacher quality problem in the
1990’s — before No Child Left Behind ever came on the scene. At that
point, in a compromise, Congress reverted to another dodge that equates
transparency with progress. It attempted to improve the often dismal
quality of colleges of education by simply requiring the schools to make public
how many of their students had failed teacher certification tests. That
clearly hasn’t worked. Colleges of education are still much in need of
improvement.
In addition, many of the states have adopted what some have described as an
elaborate shell game, setting allegedly high standards for teachers that are
then ignored at hiring time. This is especially common in inner-city
school districts, which typically have more than twice as many uncertified
teachers as affluent districts in the suburbs do.
We hope that Secretary Spellings is serious about solving this problem. To
do so, however, she will need to hold the line against a long-established
pattern of misrepresentation and foot-dragging in the states. That will
mean leveraging the billions of dollars that the federal government spends on
education in a way that actually rewards the states that perform well while
punishing those that don’t.
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