States recently submitted their first mandatory report on the percentage of "highly qualified teachers" to the Department of Education. The results--acquired by the Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request are nonsensical. Can it be true that the state of Wisconsin has 98.6% highly qualified teachers? Can it be true, as six states reported, that children in high poverty schools are six times more likely to be assigned a highly qualified teacher? Can it be that only Alaska, Alabama, and California are the only states with less than half of their teachers highly qualified? Is it true that in South Dakota, children on average have an 85% chance of having a highly qualified teacher, unless they are in high poverty schools, in which case they only have a 16% chance? The highly qualified teacher numbers ranged from 98.6% in Wisconsin to 16% in Alaska, with 33 states reporting at over 80% highly qualified.

The truth is that these numbers are closer to fiction than fact, based largely on how states chose to count. In attempts to show compliance with NCLB, states are playing fast and loose with the numbers, defining "highly qualified teacher" in widely varying ways and relying heavily on estimation and guesswork. In Alabama, 23,000 teachers were simply omitted from the count. This is an illustration of the tech term GIGO: Garbage in, garbage out. We can only hope that as they hammer our their definitions of highly qualified teacher and their HOUSSE standards for veteran teachers, states will stop using accounting methods that would make Enron executives blush.

In an attempt to help states overcome their massive troubles with compliance, the federal government has dispatched technical experts on teacher quality and the new law. The "Teacher Assistance Corps" has already visited Oregon, Illinois, Tennessee, Maine, Kansas, Maryland, and Alabama.

Maybe the folks in Washington could send some help up to Maryland, where the state has approved a standard that effectively negates the highly qualified teacher requirement for veteran teachers. According to Maryland's plan, anyone who has "advanced certification"--i.e., anyone who has been in the classroom for 10 years--is automatically highly qualified. We must have missed that part of the law.