The Sacramento Bee

Peter Schrag: Good teachers or warm bodies: Which will we get?
By Peter Schrag -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 am PST Wednesday, December 8, 2004

The latest report on California's public-school teachers brings more sobering news, both about the shortage of qualified teachers and about the distinct possibility that the shortage will get more severe in the coming years. But that may not be the worst of it.

The report, issued today by the Santa Cruz-based Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, indicates the number of underprepared teachers, which spiked in the wake of the state's rush into class size reduction in the mid-1990s, has declined. But it's still too high.

And, as in the past, there are five times as many of those underprepared teachers in high-poverty schools and those with large concentrations of Latino and black kids as in schools serving the affluent. In the high-income schools, only 3 percent of teachers are underprepared. In low-income schools, it's 15 percent.

In high schools generally, moreover, nearly a third of all physics teachers are underprepared or lack training in their subject. In math and the life sciences, it's one out of five. Compounding the problem is the fact that state funding for in-service training, now called professional development, has been cut from $222 million in 2000-01 to $63 million in each of the past two years.

More troubling, however, is the report's finding that with the expected spurt of teacher retirements in the next few years, a growing bulge in high school enrollment, and cuts in higher education and teacher training funding, the state may face a much bigger shortage in the next few years.

We may not even know it. If we gradually reduce standards to keep classes staffed, the numbers can look good even as the quality of teaching sinks ever lower.

The center's definition of a prepared teacher - a teacher who has earned "full teaching credentials, which usually means completing their course work and student teaching and passing key tests" - is tighter than the state's, which includes interns in the count of the prepared. But it's still too generous.

Licensure, as center Director Margaret Gaston said, "doesn't guarantee quality."

California has spent much of the past decade upgrading curricular requirements and implementing elaborate testing and accountability programs - now augmented by the federal standards imposed by the No Child Left Behind Act.

But the state is still struggling to align teacher education programs at many California State University campuses, which train the lion's share of our teachers, with California's curricular guidelines. The professors who teach teachers regard themselves as professionals, not functionaries in a trade school. Moving the system is a glacial process.

One encouraging sign is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's new appointees to the state's Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which sets the standards for teacher certification.

The new members, three of them senior teacher-experts in various content fields, the two others people with considerable experience in curricular reform, all have a long record of commitment to the state's standards and the importance of providing the qualified teaching to fully implement them. (The list is at www.governor.ca.gov.)

Getting the best teachers may also mean offering well-qualified candidates more alternative routes to the credential: richer general education courses and subject matter mastery, more practical classroom experience and less of what a lot of critics regard as ed-school Mickey Mouse.

In another sign that we're settling for too little, the center's report, reflecting state policy, appears to regard existing teacher staffing levels as normative. But even with class size in grades K-3 at 20-1 or fewer, California's student-teacher ratio is still the second highest in the nation.

That doesn't necessarily mean reducing class sizes across the board, but it ought to call for an examination of just where very small classes work and under what circumstances, and where they don't. Almost certainly, adequate resources, particularly in low performing schools, require better staffing levels - more help (and training) for principals, more counselors, librarians, reading specialists.

That issue wasn't part of the center's franchise, but it has to be in the picture for teaching to improve. More important yet, the report's unsurprising finding that one in six or seven kids in low-income and minority schools still has an underqualified teacher - underqualified even by the report's standards - make it imperative that the state figure out a way of getting genuinely good teachers into those schools and keeping them there.

That can't be done just by increasing the supply, though it would help. It has to be done by increasing the incentives in the needy schools - differential pay, better working conditions, more support for teachers, more prep time.

What may make the most difference in teacher quality is when principals in all schools can choose among five or six candidates for each teacher slot, and not be forced to accept the first warm body they send from downtown. But as Gaston said, "We need to act immediately."

Is anybody in the Capitol listening?

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