The first comprehensive statewide assessment of teacher qualifications confirms what anecdotal evidence and studies have suggested for years: Poor and minority children–the students who often need the most help–are most likely to have the least-qualified teachers.
Data released Friday showed that children in Illinois’ high-poverty schools are 10 times more likely than students from low-poverty schools to have classes taught by teachers who are not “highly qualified” because they don’t have a state teaching certificate or are teaching subjects outside their expertise.
East Aurora, Waukegan, Harvey and Country Club Hills school districts were among those with the highest percentage of classes not taught by highly qualified teachers during the 2002-03 school year. In all those districts, more than 10 percent of classes in the core academic subjects were led by teachers who didn’t meet standards. In Chicago Public Schools, about 12 percent of teachers last year were not highly qualified.
Statewide, 2.1 percent of classes are not taught by highly qualified teachers, one of the lowest percentages in the country, based on an analysis by the non-profit Education Trust. However, the group also contends that Illinois’ definition of highly qualified is too lax, especially for middle school teachers.
In high-poverty schools, 5.4 percent of classes are not taught by highly qualified teachers compared with 0.5 percent of classes in low-poverty schools, according to data released as part of the state’s annual report card. The high-poverty schools have difficulty recruiting and keeping teachers because they generally pay lower salaries and have more challenging working conditions, said state Supt. of Education Robert Schiller.
High-poverty schools are defined as those where at least 57.4 percent of students are in the Free and Reduced Lunch Program. Low-poverty schools have 12.5 percent or fewer students in the program.
Students most in need hurt
“These are the kids who need the best teachers, and they frequently aren’t even getting minimally qualified teachers,” said Don Moore of Designs for Change, a school-reform advocacy group. “The school system has allowed this problem to go on for decades.”
But the problem must stop by 2005-06, when schools are required to have only highly qualified teachers, according to the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
The definition of highly qualified is left to the states, and Illinois says teachers should have a bachelor’s degree, a state teaching certificate, and competence in their subject area.
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In June, state education officials loosened the standards for veteran middle school teachers when they dropped the requirement to prove competency in each of the subjects they teach. Now they are required only to have passed a general test that covers all core subjects–the same test administered to elementary teachers.
“Other states didn’t do this,” said Kevin Carey, a senior policy analyst with Education Trust who has analyzed teacher qualification data in every state. “Illinois has adopted a definition of highly qualified teacher that is not nearly as rigorous as other states have used. On a long-run basis, this is detrimental to Illinois schoolchildren.”
The standards are stricter for new teachers and high school instructors; they are not considered highly qualified if they teach a class outside their subject knowledge–such as a math instructor teaching reading.
East Aurora hit hard
Juan Sepulveda II, a junior at East High School in East Aurora District 131, said he is concerned for his siblings at Brady Elementary, where 48 percent of classes are taught by teachers who don’t meet standards.
“I am bothered,” said Sepulveda, president of the science club at East High School. “They always come to me for help. They just say that the teachers don’t teach it to them.”
In East Aurora, where there are high numbers of low-income and Hispanic students, nearly 18 percent of classes aren’t taught by highly qualified teachers.
John Struck, East Aurora associate superintendent, said the district struggles to attract highly coveted bilingual teachers. He said many of the 200 bilingual teachers have provisional certification because they are from other countries or have non-education degrees, and have not passed the state certification test. Others lack courses in the subject area they are assigned.
“We will be closing that gap before the official deadline everyone must meet in 2005,” Struck said. “Many are going back to get degrees.”
District raises standards
In the south suburban Country Club Hills school district, where nearly all students are African-American, 11 percent of classes last year did not have highly qualified teachers. But this year, only one teacher in the three-school district is not certified, said superintendent Charlie Kent, who said he went to many recruitment fairs last spring and summer.
“We made it a priority,” Kent said. The district hired 16 new teachers, 11 of whom are teaching for the first time. “It has always been hard to recruit teachers all across the south suburban region. Other districts are in the same boat as we are, but we made a concerted effort to get the job done.”
Statewide teacher qualification data also was released last year, but because there was no uniform definition of highly qualified, it was impossible to compare districts. Some of the data may be muddied again this year for similar reasons.
Chicago Public Schools, for example, indicated which teachers were certified but did not consider whether they were teaching in their field. For that reason, although the district reported 7.6 percent of teachers were not highly qualified, it acknowledges that the more accurate figure is 12 percent.
Richard Ingersoll, a University of Pennsylvania education and sociology professor, said that means there is an even larger gap in teacher quality–one of the most reliable predictors of a student’s academic success–between poor and wealthy schools.
“We can think of teacher quality as a resource like money,” he said. “In this case, it is mal-distributed.”
State education officials also said this week that Illinois teachers are the least experienced they’ve been in a decade. The average Illinois public school teacher has an average of 13.9 years in the classroom compared with a high of 16 years in 1993.
“All that can mean is that you will get less progress from kids,” said Lisa Graham Keegan, chief executive of the Washington-based Education Leaders Council and former state superintendent of public instruction in Arizona. “You do not want to be in a situation where you’re putting a child in a classroom with a new teacher year after year.”