California has been in the hot seat since the U.S. Department of Education noticed that it was planning to meet the ???highly qualified teachers??? requirement of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act by labeling teaching interns and those with emergency certification as ???highly qualified.??? The new law requires that all newly-hired teachers who work with Title I students must be highly qualified, and that all teachers of core subjects in all schools must be highly qualified by 2005-06. NCLB defines a highly qualified teacher as one who has full state certification or is participating in an alternate route certification AND who has demonstrated competence in the subjects he or she teaches. Rep. George Miller, one of the driving forces behind NCLB, criticized members of the California Board of Education who devised the sketchy plan for meeting the requirement and urged them to reconsider the policy. If the state does not revise its definition of highly qualified so that it comports with the federal law, the U.S. Department of Education could withhold some of the state???s Title I funds (which total nearly $1 billion).
State officials say that experienced teachers are in short supply, and that low-income schools will be forced to raise class sizes to 50 or 60 pupils if they cannot hire teachers without full certification. The number of uncredentialed teachers in California soared after the state began its massive class-size-reduction initiative in 1996, but the state does have 350,000 fully certified teachers. These teachers meet the definition of highly qualified under NCLB and, if they were deployed in Title I schools, the state would be in compliance for 2002-2003. In other words, California could meet NCLB???s expectations for staffing Title I schools if it redeployed its teaching force and stopped concentrating new instructors and those with the least subject knowledge in schools that enroll poor and minority children. For the longer run, however, this state (and most others) will need to rethink its system of licensure so that individuals who might be talented teachers are no longer discouraged by the hoops and hurdles of traditional certification.
???California Education Funding Imperiled,??? by Nanette Asimov, San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 2002
???State, U.S. Feud over Teachers,??? by Duke Helfand, Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2002
???Tortuous Routes,??? by David Ruenzel, Education Next, Spring 2002