[Waves hand madly] I’m hear, Dr. Cranky! Pick me pick me!
Gosh, there’s a lot of oversimplifying and, frankly, wrongheaded thinking going on in here, but that’s not surprising because few people outside K-12 education realize how difficult it is. People tend to extrapolate widely from their own experiences (ahem, catsix), which by definition aren’t representative - and dopers as a whole aren’t exactly representative, either.
Now then - a specific question of qualified teachers and No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In general, NCLB requires that teachers become “highly qualified” by the end of the 2005-06 school year. In elementary schools, "highly qualified’ is usually not that big a deal, because having a teaching certificate in elementary education will do the trick. The big problem is secondary schools. In order to be highly qualified, secondary school teachers must hold one of the following credentials in each subject they teach: a college major or equivalent coursework, an advanced degree, specialized certification, or a passing score on a subject-matter exam. (Experienced teachers can get evaluated in lieu of one of these credentials, so in theory if Mrs. Jones has been a successful chemistry teacher for 20 years, but never got a B.S. in chemistry, she can continue in her position.) As an abstract matter, this is laudable, because we know that many teachers are teaching out-of-subject-area, disproportionately in low-income schools and districts. The definition isn’t a perfect solution, though, because it usually only measures teacher inputs - credentials - not teacher outputs, meaning how effective an individual teacher is.
The enormous problem is that we’re already confonting dramatic shortages in many subjects, and NCLB does nothing to address that problem directly. For example, physics. I was at an education law conference in July, where I spoke with several faculty members from Virginia Commonwealth University’s education department. VCU is one of about a dozen Virginia universities offering teacher certification programs. In all of these schools, how many people got teaching certificates in physics in the 2003-04 academic year?
And we’re speaking about a large state, with (on the whole) a pretty decent school system, decent funding, able to attract candidates.
Now, as for catsix: until you demonstrate that you have some understanding of child development, neuroscience, differentiated instruction, or any of the conditions that uniquely affect K-12 education but which by definition are largely absent from classes comprised exclusively of late adolescents and adults, I’d suggest that you adopt a different tone. You have some legitimate points, but you aren’t doing yourself any favors because you seem not to know what you don’t know.
So far, I’m not encouraged by early results from “alternate route” certification programs like Troops to Teachers, NYC Teaching Fellows, etc. In these programs, credentialed professionals without education degrees or teaching certificates are placed in K-12 classrooms. Candidates in these programs are generally deemed “highly qualified” even though they aren’t certified, reflecting Rod Paige’s views - he despises education departments for much the same reasons catsix does.) But it appears that the dropout and burnout rates tend to be even higher than conventional programs. Education degrees may not be worth very much, but they’re still better than nothing - and having good in-field credentials doesn’t seem to compensate.
And a question, now that there’s an SAT score debate going on - why on earth do you think that it appropriate to use a norm-referenced assessment as an exit exam? All a norm-referenced assessment can tell you is how one particular student does compared to another student (and only inexactly at that) - it tells you basically nothing about what either student has actually learned.