Educating California: Some Good Teachers, Left Behind

Samuel G. Freedman takes a look at the operation of No Child Left Behind and the educational establishment in this New York Times article.

Jefferds Huyck stood in a corner of the gymnasium, comfortable in being inconspicuous, as the annual awards ceremony began one Friday last May at Pacific Collegiate School in Santa Cruz, Calif. He listened as the principal named 16 of Mr. Huyck’s students who had earned honors in a nationwide Latin exam, and he applauded as those protégés gathered near center court to receive their certificates.

Then the principal, Andrew Goldenkranz, said, “And here’s their teacher.” Hundreds of students and parents and colleagues rose unbidden in a standing ovation. In that gesture, they were both celebrating and protesting.

As virtually everyone in the audience knew, Mr. Huyck would be leaving Pacific Collegiate, a charter school, after commencement. Despite his doctorate in classics from Harvard, despite his 22 years teaching in high school and college, despite the classroom successes he had so demonstrably achieved with his Latin students in Santa Cruz, he was not considered “highly qualified” by California education officials under their interpretation of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Rather than submit to what he considered an expensive, time-consuming indignity, a teacher-certification program geared to beginners that would last two years and cost about $15,000, Mr. Huyck decided to resign and move across town to teach in a private school. And in his exasperation, he was not alone.

Take some good ideas, some bad ideas, add a generous dose of special interests and mix vigorously with federal mandates and you can bake a cake guaranteed to drive many of the best teachers out of the profession.

TO call this situation perverse, to ascribe it to the principle of unintended consequences, is to be, if anything, too reasonable. With the quality of teacher training being widely assailed as undemanding, most recently in a report last month by the Education Schools Project, a nonpartisan group, Pacific Collegiate in 2005 had what certainly looked like the solution. Out of a faculty of 29, 12 already had or were nearing doctoral degrees, primarily related to the subjects they taught.

And if the performance of the school mattered for anything, which unfortunately it does not in the credentialing issue, then Pacific Collegiate could show results. Admitting its 400 students in Grades 7 through 12 by lottery rather than by admissions exam, it recorded an average of 1,982 out of a possible 2,400 on the three-part SAT and sent graduates to Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Swarthmore and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among other elite universities.
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Under California law, a teacher must successfully complete a certification program to fulfill the mandate of No Child Left Behind that there be a “highly qualified” instructor in every classroom. Marilyn Errett, an administrator with the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing, said California did offer a fast-track route for experienced teachers in the core subjects of English, science and math, as well as a path that combined a teaching internship with 100 hours of college course work.

She was not sympathetic, however, to the notion that teachers with doctorates and instructional experience at college get some kind of waiver. “Certainly, no one is questioning their grasp of the subject matter,” she said. But she added that they need to learn how to work with children in immigrant families who have limited English skills and students being moved from special education classes to regular ones. “Those are skills we think they need to have,” she said.

I'm not totally unsympathetic to those goals, but there has got to be a better path. Many States attempts to comply with NCLB impose utterly unreasonable burdens on teachers in record keeping, training and classroom management. Each child is supposed to get an educational program tailored to her individual needs, but the teacher has twenty plus other students needing exactly the same.

In the post-Sputnik days of America's scientific humiliation, we adopted a program of Summer teacher institutes which not only provided free education for science teachers, but a modest stipend. If we are serious about improving American education, a similar program with wider scope could be set up today. If Mr. Jack or Dr. Jill has a demonstrated need for more skills in working with children of immigrant families with limited English, let them get it there rather than pile on miscelleaneous coursework and often utterly irrelevant instruction at the end of a long teaching day.

This particular requirement, by the way, has much less to do with ensuring qualified teachers than it has to do with ensuring full education college classes.