Quality Counts Points to Shortage of Qualified Teachers in High-Need Districts

On January 7, 2003, just one day before the first anniversary of the signing of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (for a summary and analysis of NCLB, see the ACCESS NCLB pages), Education Week, a major education periodical, released its annual "Quality Counts" survey of schooling in the 50 states and Washington, D.C. The report, Quality Counts 2003: If I Can't Learn from You, focuses on the major shortage of qualified teachers in high-poverty, high-minority, and low-performing schools. The report, which has received widespread coverage in the press, says that while a number of states use incentives to recruit teachers, those incentives are rarely used to find qualified teachers for the schools that need them the most.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires that there be a "highly qualified" teacher in every classroom by 2005-2006, although each state can decide on its own definition of "highly qualified." 2003 is the first year that states must report how many "highly qualified teachers they have" in total, but while average- and high-income districts have rising numbers of quality teachers, the shortage remains acute in resource-poor districts. NCLB also requires that all schools make Annual Yearly Progress on student test scores, and a 1998 study by the Education Trust, Good Teaching Matters: How Well-Qualified Teachers Can Close the Gap, revealed that teacher quality raises student achievement.

Prepared January 9, 2003