Better Teachers Are Key to Reform, Report Says

The most comprehensive analysis ever of California’s mounting teacher shortage warns that education reform is doomed unless the state mounts a costly, emergency campaign to address the dearth of qualified teachers at public schools serving poor, minority children.

The report, to be released today, found that the percentage of ill-trained teachers at schools serving the greatest number of minority children is on average six times the level at schools where most students are white.

Similarly, schools serving third-graders whose test scores are the lowest in reading have five times the proportion of untrained teachers as schools where children score highest.

“School reform efforts are destined to failure if we don’t take the quality of teachers into account, and we haven’t been taking it into account,” said Harvey Hunt, executive director of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, the Santa Cruz-based group that was the main sponsor of the teacher quality report.

The report, issued by a coalition of the state’s two public university systems and several private foundations, stopped short of calling for “combat pay” for teaching in such schools but said teachers should be eligible for perks such as a salary of up to $20,000 while they attend university training courses full-time.

The call to action, also made by state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin and some legislative and university officials, spotlights a shortage that is national in scope, but is worst in states with the fastest-growing school-age populations, such as California.

The issue of teacher quality has assumed center stage amid growing awareness that the billions of dollars the state has invested in smaller class sizes, higher academic standards and more textbooks will not pay off in increased student learning without better instruction.

The state needs to hire about 25,000 teachers a year over the next decade to cope with growing enrollments and escalating retirements of veteran teachers.

It is not simply a matter of turning out more teachers, however, because the state already has at least 32,000 credentialed teachers available from new graduates, newcomers from other states and those returning to work. The problem is that many choose not to teach or that they are unwilling to teach in urban areas where the needs are greatest.

Statewide, one in 10 teachers lacks a credential. But the ratio is far higher in urban areas such as Los Angeles, where one in four teachers is learning on the job. And the problem is getting worse.

This year, three of every four teachers hired in Los Angeles had yet to obtain a credential, and 750 of them had not passed a test of the knowledge expected of an elementary school teacher. In contrast, the schools in the adjacent district of Santa Monica have dozens of fully qualified applicants for every job.

Next week, the heads of 50 public and private colleges and universities will gather at Stanford University for an unprecedented summit in which participants will consider ways to increase the quantity of teachers they train while simultaneously upgrading the quality of their training.

Stanford President Gerhard Casper said that finding high-quality teachers for inner-city schools is “the main problem we face as a country and in California in particular” and that solving it will require financial incentives and an understanding of the real challenges of classrooms.

“I would hope that what comes out of the summit is a clearer focus on the substance that teachers need to know and convey and how that can be combined with issues of teaching methods,” he said.

Traditionally, teacher training has been a marginal activity at top universities, such as Stanford and the University of California. But the UC system plans to double, to 2,500, the number of teachers it prepares annually and is raising money to provide free tuition and books to those teachers who agree to work in inner-city schools.

Charles Reed, the chancellor of the California State University system, endorsed the notion of paying teachers more or providing bonuses.

“You have to focus more on attracting more people into the teaching profession but at the same time you have to prepare them better,” he said.

Although schools serving the poor have always been at a disadvantage in hiring, the situation became dramatically worse three years ago when the state launched a multibillion-dollar effort to reduce class sizes in grade three and below to no more than 20 students.

That initiative, highly popular with parents, was intended to improve the early teaching of math and reading. It had the immediate effect of creating a statewide demand for about one-third more teachers in those grades.

That meant that elementary school teachers could seek jobs at schools closer to their homes or in more affluent areas, and it appears that many did, exacerbating inequities between schools serving the affluent and those serving the poor. “The state is completely committed to early literacy, and the students scoring the lowest--those who need the most help and are most at risk--are the most likely to have unqualified teachers,” said Patrick Shields, a researcher at SRI International who was the lead author of the report. “There is simply no justification for that.”

The report found that at nearly 1,400 schools more than one in five teachers are underqualified. More than 1 million children attend those schools, which the report says are dysfunctional.

“This,” the authors said, “must change or we risk an economic and social disaster that will affect us all.”

The report’s call for dramatic action was greeted enthusiastically by Los Angeles officials.

“Until we can have some lure to get them to go there or the authority to place people at particular schools, this is the way it’s going to be for a while,” said Michael Acosta, who is in charge of teacher recruitment for the district.

This year, the stakes are even higher. A new push for accountability means that the state eventually could take over the management of poorly performing schools. In addition, students who cannot keep up with their peers are supposed to be held back rather than promoted to the next grade, and eventually all students will have to pass an exit exam to get a diploma.

Representatives of Gov. Gray Davis defended efforts to improve teacher quality but agreed that more remains to be done. This year, for example, the state paid for a tenfold increase, to 5,500 teachers, in the state’s program to forgive tuition loans in return for serving in schools facing a shortage of qualified teachers.

In addition, Davis this year increased the starting salaries of teachers to $32,000 and has supported expansion of paid internships and other efforts to ensure that teachers who have not completed their training get on-the-job assistance from veteran mentors. The new report says starting salaries must rise to $40,000 to make a difference.

“It’s not just a question of finding [teachers], but when you find them, you have to keep them,” said Michael Bustamante, a Davis spokesman.

Fortunately, the authors of the report and legislators say, the state’s robust economy is expected to generate a surplus of as much as $2.6 billion this year, much of which could be used to address the issue.

The report’s authors say all of its six recommendations--which include eliminating the hiring of unqualified teachers, expanding loan forgiveness efforts, giving hard-to-staff schools $350 per pupil to use for recruitment and raising salaries for new teachers--would cost $1.3 billion annually.

Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) last year proposed giving the lowest-performing schools a total of $272 million with which to recruit fully trained teachers, either with higher salaries, promises of more in-depth professional development or other perks. Steinberg said the new attention to the teacher quality issue increases the likelihood that such a bill could succeed this year.

“We’ve talked about accountability on the part of schools, which is appropriate,” he said, “but if we’re going to make accountability work for all schools we need to make sure every student is taught by a qualified teacher.”

The full text of the report is available on the Web site of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning at www.CFTLL.org

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Teaching Quality

Schools serving mostly minority and poor children have many more unqualified teachers on average than schools where the students are mostly white and middle class, according to a report on California’s teacher shortage.

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Source: The Center for the Future of Teaching & Learning