No state has met the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) teacher-qualification goals for this school year, the AP reports. Nine states, plus DC and Puerto Rico, may lose federal aid because they did not try hard enough to comply by the law’s deadline.
I’ve never been a fan of NCLB, but the teacher qualifications seem pretty reasonable: teachers of math, history and other “core subjects” must have “a bachelor’s degree, a state license and proven competency in every subject they teach.” NCLB calls such teachers “highly qualified,” though this seems pretty minimal to me.
If it was simple to fix education, though, it would have been done already. There’s no one person or group to blame here. Clearly, however, something isn’t working. Setting goals for teacher quality is all well and good, but if no state can meet them, are we really doing enough to address the root causes of the problem?