Lesson One: Training Counts

As children across California strap on their backpacks and return to school, parents are crossing their fingers. They know intuitively what numerous studies have shown: The single most important influence on a child’s achievement is the teacher. And in our state, these days, a child’s chance of encountering a highly skilled, well-trained and caring teacher is a lot smaller than it should be.

In a 2001 poll, 87% of Californians identified well-qualified teachers in every classroom as the key to raising student achievement, far ahead of reforms like vouchers or testing. When asked what makes a good teacher, they listed knowledge about teaching and learning first, followed by knowledge of classroom management and subject matter.

But in California schools, more than 40,000 teachers--nearly 15% of the total--lack these basic qualifications. California has more emergency-credentialed teachers than in 25 other states combined. Last year, in addition to 37,000 teachers working on emergency permits, who had not met the state’s standards for content knowledge or teaching skills, about 2,500 teachers were working on waivers without having passed even the state’s basic skills test. Others are teaching on “intern” or “pre-intern” credentials while they finish their training. These teachers make up well over half the staff in some schools serving large concentrations of low-income and minority students. These are often the same schools that lack textbooks, supplies, adequate facilities and decent working conditions.

The reasons for this situation are now familiar. Proposition 13 led to reduced funding to schools while enrollments were growing. Salaries slipped and class sizes grew. Then, state law requiring smaller class sizes increased demand for teachers and led rich districts to raid poor districts for qualified teachers.

Less acknowledged is how much these disparities affect learning. At least four recent studies in California have found that, after controlling for student poverty and conditions like class size, the proportion of emergency-credentialed teachers in a school significantly lowers student achievement on state tests. As student promotion and graduation are now tied to these tests, requiring higher standards for kids without requiring any standards for their teachers threatens to leave more and more children behind.

No Child Left Behind--the federal law passed last year to improve education for underserved students--was intended to remedy this situation. It not only requires states to test every child every year, with rewards and sanctions attached to the scores, it also requires that states provide all children with “highly qualified” teachers by 2005-06. It defines these teachers as being fully certified by the state and having demonstrated competence in the subjects they teach. Funds are provided to states to help them implement plans to reach this goal.

Seems like a sensible idea. But rather than formulate a plan to get qualified teachers into all the state’s classrooms, the State Board of Education instead tried to define away the problem by proposing to set the standards for “highly qualified teachers” at the level currently required of those who enter teaching on emergency permits. The U.S. Department of Education said it could not accept this definition, and California is back at the drawing board.

Although the situation looks daunting, it is fixable, as other states and districts have shown. The problems in staffing California schools are not caused by shortages of qualified individuals in the state or the nation. Nationally and in California, there are two to three times as many certified teachers in the population as there are in the schools. Many states in the Midwest and New England have teacher surpluses. Most of the “shortages” exist because people are unwilling to work in cities and poor rural districts that pay less than those in the suburbs and have larger classes and fewer resources.

Such disparities plague California. In 2001, beginning teacher salaries ranged from $23,000 to $45,000. After adjusting for cost of living, there was a 3-1 ratio between the starting salaries offered by Vallecito Union, a high-achieving Calaveras County district with no uncertified teachers, and Alum Rock Union, a low-performing San Jose district where 34% of all teachers are not fully certified. Economist Michael Pogodzinski found that California districts offering lower salaries than others in their county have more emergency hires.

Other studies have found that teachers who are underprepared leave their jobs at much higher rates than those who are fully certified. About 35% of emergency-credentialed teachers leave within the first year, and more than 60% never receive a credential. Teachers who are unprepared are typically shocked by the number of things they don’t know how to do; feel inadequate in meeting the needs of the wide range of students in their classes; and experience more stress and less success than teachers who have learned how to organize a classroom, motivate and engage students and plan curriculums. By contrast, at least 70% of prepared teachers generally remain in the profession after five years. Mentoring also matters. Teachers who receive intensive one-on-one classroom mentoring during their first year also stay at much higher rates.

Reducing attrition is one of the most important ways to meet the demand for teachers because it accounts for most of the supply problem and wastes precious resources. According to the Texas Center for Educational Research, it costs about $8,000 to recruit, hire and orient a replacement teacher--money that could be better spent helping teachers become more effective in the first place.

When conditions improve, qualified teachers appear and stay. The recent experience of New York City is instructive. A state mandate that uncertified teachers could no longer be placed in low-performing schools--along with the requirements of the new federal law--led to improvements in hiring practices and a 16% increase in teachers’ salaries to make them more comparable to the surrounding suburbs. The coming school year’s vacancies were filled by July, and 90% of the new hires are fully certified, in contrast with only 60% the year before. The remaining 10% will be certified within the year.

Some California cities serving large proportions of low-income and minority students have done the same. New Haven Unified, which serves Union City in Alameda County, has long been known for having surpluses of teachers because of its single-minded focus on getting and keeping those who are well-qualified. Anaheim and San Diego have recently turned the corner, hiring almost all certified teachers last year by combining aggressive recruitment from local colleges and out of state with increased salaries, improved working conditions in high-need schools and mentoring supports. These initiatives benefited from policies recently enacted to help recruit and retain qualified teachers in high-need schools--even if these are not yet on a scale sufficient to solve the problem.

When purpose is joined with persistence, these problems can be solved. Connecticut is a case in point: It went from 20 years of teacher shortages in its major cities to surpluses statewide within three years by increasing salaries until it was the top-paying state in the nation and equalizing the pay across districts. At the same time, the state improved teacher education and mentoring, provided scholarships for teaching candidates in high-need fields and eliminated emergency credentialing. Connecticut’s schools became among the best in the nation, even as they served a growing share of students from low-income and immigrant families.

California--the largest and wealthiest economy in the nation and the fifth-largest in the world--can and should do the same. A high-tech economy like ours cannot run well without a highly skilled labor force. In the poll mentioned earlier, eight out of 10 Californians agreed that “we should ensure that all children, including those who are economically disadvantaged, have teachers who are fully qualified, even if that means spending more money to achieve that goal.”

Education can be a strong weapon in the fight against crime. Most prison inmates are functionally illiterate, and 40% of adjudicated juveniles have learning disabilities that were not diagnosed in school. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, criminal justice expenditures in California grew by 900% while spending for education grew by less than 25% in real-dollar terms. A year in prison for one inmate costs taxpayers up to $30,000. Average costs per pupil in grades K-12 are now less than $6,000. We can pay for qualified teachers now or for prisons later. It’s California’s choice.