Craig Jerald and Richard Ingersoll, Education Trust
August 2002
The Education Trust's Craig Jerald and the University of Pennsylvania's Richard Ingersoll teamed up to produce this fine, short (12-page), hard-hitting look at the problem of out-of-field teaching, based on recently issued federal data. It concludes that "The amount of out-of-field teaching in the nation and states remains unacceptably high, with classes in high-poverty and high-minority schools much more likely to be assigned to a teacher lacking minimal academic qualifications in the subject being taught&.[W]hile out-of-field teaching is far too pervasive at the high school level, the problem is even worse in middle schools, where very high rates of mis-assignment suggest a staggering disregard for whether teachers have the minimal academic foundation necessary to teach classes in core academic subject areas." Worse, the study finds "no progress" in solving this problem between 1993 and 2000. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that it's not mostly a consequence of teacher shortages. Rather, as Ingersoll has written elsewhere, "the solution to a big chunk of this problem is in the hands of state officials and local administrators-right now." The data are sobering. For example, in high-poverty/minority middle schools, about half of the core academic classes are taught by people who did not even earn an academic "minor" (much less a major) in those subjects. (This is also true of nearly two-fifths of low-poverty/minority middle schools.) Moreover, the numbers show wide variation by state. In Minnesota, fewer than 10 percent of core secondary classes are taught by teachers with neither majors nor minors in those fields; In Louisiana, Delaware, New Mexico and Tennessee, however, that's the case with more than 35% of secondary classes. Even in high-spending Connecticut and Alaska, it's nearly 30%. Small wonder a bunch of states are nervous about the new federal requirement that every teacher be "highly qualified" a few years hence! You can download your very own copy (in PDF format) at http://www.edtrust.org/main/documents/AllTalk.pdf.
