Study Calls Poor Teacher Training a ‘National Shame’

Declaring that one in four teachers in the nation’s public schools is unqualified, a national blue-ribbon commission on Thursday issued a scathing indictment of the quality of America’s teachers and the colleges and school districts responsible for recruiting, training and supporting them.

The report by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future called it “a great national shame” that a quarter of the country’s classroom instructors either have not been trained as teachers or do not fully meet state licensing standards.

And it bore troubling news for California, which is in the midst of a massive teacher hiring campaign that some fear will send thousands more unprepared teachers into the classroom.

The commission, headed by North Carolina Gov. James B. Hunt and including top corporate chiefs as well as the heads of the country’s two largest teachers unions, urged a drastic overhaul of the teacher education programs in colleges and school districts and the reform of district recruitment practices, which it called “woefully slipshod.”

President Clinton, campaigning in Fresno on Thursday, called on Education Secretary Richard W. Riley to immediately begin implementing the commission’s recommendations.

“We should be lifting our teachers up, not bashing them and finding ways just to be critical,” Clinton said in an indirect slap at Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole, who routinely criticizes teachers unions as enemies of education.

California did not fare well in the report, which used data from the 1990-91 school year to conclude that 13% of the state’s newly hired teachers were unlicensed.

In the state’s high schools, 51% of those teaching mathematics--considered one of the most specialized subjects--did not major, or even minor, in math in college.

Although state officials say it is too early to provide precise figures, they predict that as the state scrambles to hire the 16,000 elementary instructors it needs this year to reduce class size in the primary grades, many of those teachers will be inexperienced in the classroom and lack the formal training required for a permanent credential.

The state last year licensed only 5,000 new teachers. This year the Legislature approved changes that would make it easier for college graduates to work in the classroom while they try to meet licensing requirements. Supporters of that approach say it will open up a huge pool of qualified individuals who may lack official sanction but have the work experience, drive and enthusiasm to become good teachers.

The shortage of fully qualified teachers “is a fundamental issue in California” and could hobble its ambitious effort to raise reading and math achievement by lowering class size, says Columbia University professor Linda Darling-Hammond, the national commission’s executive director.

Nationwide, improving teacher quality has been the missing link in the school reform movement of the past decade, the commission said.

Despite the intensive reform efforts spurred by “A Nation at Risk”--the product of another blue-ribbon panel in 1983, which condemned the “rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s public schools--the commission found that relatively little has changed in the way the country educates its teachers.

And, the commission charged, this inattention to a crucial need accounts in part for the poor standing of America’s school children in international comparisons of educational achievement.

Educators have tended to ignore the obvious: that what teachers know and can do bears a direct relation to how well students learn, the commission said.

But the teachers should not shoulder all, or even most, of the blame for this, the commission was quick to note.

“Most schools and teachers cannot produce the kind of learning demanded by the new reforms--not because they do not want to, but because they do not know how--and the systems in which they work do not support them in doing so,” according to the 144-page report, called “What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future,” and based on a two-year study funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.

Perhaps the biggest problem, in the commission’s view, is “our schools’ most closely held secret”: the widespread practice of putting instructors in classrooms who have not been trained as teachers and have not completed the requirements for a teaching license.

And in districts with high proportions of minority youngsters, the report said, the odds of a student having a mathematics or science teacher who is licensed in that field are less than 50-50.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the proportion of emergency-permit teachers among new hires has risen from 38% last year to almost 50% this year. To take advantage of state funds being offered to shrink class size, the district is in the midst of a scramble to hire 2,600 new first and second-grade teachers.

“We’re entering a period of time where we’re going to see a lot of [uncredentialed teachers],” said district personnel administrator Michael Acosta. “Everybody that’s credentialed has already been picked up by some district in California.”

The national commission’s finding that only one in two high school math teachers in California majored or minored in the subject in college is the source of “a big problem,” and may account for the poor performance of the state’s students on national math achievement exams, said James Brown, superintendent of the Glendale Unified School District and co-chair of the California Mathematics Task Force, which last year urged sweeping changes in the way schools teach math.

The teaching commission has urged that the nation set a goal of providing a fully trained and credentialed teacher in every public school classroom within a decade, a daunting challenge that cannot likely be accomplished through piecemeal reform but requires a commitment to a collection of interwoven strategies.

These include making the teaching profession more attractive by upgrading salaries, linking pay to teachers’ knowledge and skills, intensifying efforts to remove incompetent teachers, giving low-wealth districts the funds necessary to hire well-prepared instructors and providing incentives to enter teaching areas that suffer chronic shortages, such as math and science.

Some of those recommendations are likely to draw criticism from the ranks of teachers unions, which were represented on the study team. Many union leaders have traditionally opposed the concept of “merit pay,” fought efforts to loosen job-protection rules, and resisted the concept of “peer review” touted by the commission.

The report asks unions to move beyond traditional concerns, such as collective bargaining and tenure rights, which may make it a hard sell among rank-and-file teachers, said Keith Geiger, past president of the National Education Assn. and a member of the commission.

“The whole idea of utilizing peer assistance and review is going to be very controversial . . . but these are issues we can’t shy away from,” he said.

And some education leaders faulted the report for not going far enough.

The commission should have taken a firmer stand on removing incompetent teachers, said Anne Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Assn. Instead, the report skirts a serious discussion of the problems with teacher tenure rules.

And she said the report fails to acknowledge the inability of many school districts to afford its high-priced recommendations, estimated to cost the nation’s schools $5 billion annually.

Among those recommendations, the commission urged that states discontinue emergency licensing of teachers and overhaul the credentialing process to ensure that candidates are competent in the subjects they are assigned to teach. States should also offer incentives to teachers to earn national board certification, which is offered through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, but not required by any state.

The nation’s public schools will hire an estimated 2 million teachers over the next decade.

But the commission found that more than 40 states allow districts to hire teachers who have not met any basic requirements. Fewer than 75% of all teachers have studied child development, teaching methods and have degrees in the subjects they have been assigned to teach. Almost one-fourth of all secondary teachers do not have a major or minor in their primary area of teaching.

The commission found serious flaws in the teacher education programs offered in the education schools of colleges and universities. Only 500 of the nation’s 1,200 education schools are accredited, and the commission found that education programs often fail to combine opportunities for practice teaching with theoretical studies.

Times education writer Amy Pyle and staff writer John M. Broder contributed to this story.

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Teacher Quality

California fares poorly in a national study of public high school teachers who taught one or more classes in a subject without at least a college minor in that field. In every subject except social studies, California’s percentage was worse than the national average. Here are the figures:

Subject: % teaching outside their field

Math: 51.0%

Physical Education: 33.3%

English: 29.0%

Vocational Education: 27.5%

Foreign Languages: 22.5%

Art/Music: 20.1%

Science: 18.2%

Social Studies: 16.2%

Source: National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future; based on 1990-91 Schools and Staffing Survey by the U.S. Department of Education