NCLB and Teaching Quality

Why It Matters
While national attention has been riveted on the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), few have focused on what matters most to ensure that all students make adequate yearly progress — a high quality teacher. NCLB’s focus on highly qualified teachers holds the promise of closing the teaching gap in schools where poor and minority children are the most likely to have the least prepared teachers.

What We Did
With support from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, CTQ conducted case studies in four states, twelve districts, and 24 high-need schools in the southeast to examine whether the call for highly qualified teachers is being realized.

The final report, Unfulfilled Promise: Ensuring High Quality Teachers for Our Nation’s Students captures the stories of how states, schools and districts are responding to NCLB’s teaching quality mandates and brings the perspectives of district administrators, principals and teachers to this important discussion.

What We’ve Learned
After talking with more than 160 educators and surveying hundreds of teachers, our research revealed three major findings:

• “Highly Qualified” Does Not Ensure High Quality: Under NCLB, teachers are considered “highly qualified” if they meet specific requirements that focus primarily on what teachers know, not on what they are able to do.
• Hard-to-Staff Solutions Are Hard to Find: Leaders in the urban and rural districts we visited struggled to compete in the teacher labor market, even with additional NCLB funds.
• Same Approaches Will Lead to the Same Results: Most of the schools and districts we visited had not changed their recruitment or professional development practices since NCLB was passed.

In response to these findings, the report includes recommendations for the federal government, states and districts to improve the application of NCLB so that students will have not only a highly qualified teacher but also high quality teaching in every classroom, every day.