This week, NCTQ released the first of several state report cards, entitled Necessary and Insufficient: Resisting a Full Measure of Teacher Quality. Authored by NCTQ policy analyst Christopher O. Tracy and president Kate Walsh, the report evaluates and grades the progress of twenty randomly selected states toward meeting No Child Left Behind's teacher quality mandates. We were particularly interested in finding out if states are serious about implementing the law's most demanding new requirement: making sure that teachers know their subject matter.
Our conclusion was that apart from a handful of states that have done a decent job of setting standards that comply with the spirit of the law, the approach of many states can best be described as indifferent and at times disdainful of the problem at hand. States provide teachers with a menu of activities, from which teachers can select certain activities to prove they know their subject matter. Many of these activities at best tortuously relate to subject matter competency. The approved options from which teachers may choose include attending a state convention, heading an academic club, mentoring a new teacher, taking an educational technology course or learning how to better manage the classroom.
The final grades were as follows:
- Illinois: A
- Oregon: B+
- Alabama: B+
- Ohio: B
- Kentucky: B-
- New Mexico: C
- Oklahoma: C
- Georgia: C
- New Hampshire: C
- Maryland: C
- North Carolina: C-
- Tennessee: D+
- West Virginia: D+
- New York: D
- Louisiana: D-
- Michigan: F
- California: F
- Virginia: F
- South Carolina: F
- Idaho: Incomplete