Progress on Teaching Quality Initiatives Proves Slow in Kentucky

Eager to maintain the momentum sparked five years ago with reports on the importance of teaching to high quality education, the Prichard Committee has released a report entitled “Quality Teaching Initiatives in Kentucky: A Progress Report,” in which they document the status of teacher-quality initiatives in Kentucky, as well as the progress that still needs to be made for the reforms to be considered successful.

The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence has worked for more than twenty years to encourage and support reform of Kentucky’s system of public schools. The legislature enacted a comprehensive set of reforms shortly after the Kentucky Supreme Court’s landmark 1989 decision in Rose v. Council for Better Education. However, Kentucky’s reforms fell short in their initiatives for improving the quality of the teaching force. After both the Prichard Committee and a governor’s task force issued reports calling for improved teaching quality through a coherent list of reform elements, in 2000 the legislature went a long way towards enacting these proposals. Teaching quality in Kentucky has been improving since. However, like much of Kentucky’s larger reform program, progress towards “having a well-qualified teacher in every classroom” has been hampered by shrinking education budgets and by the legislature’s failure to enact a budget for the 2004-2006 biennium.

The report divides teaching quality initiatives into four categories: Compensation; Teacher Education and Preparation; Teacher Recruitment and Retention; and Professional Development. In each, the report lists programs that have been put in place and makes a series of recommendations for future improvements:

The report urges Kentucky to improve teacher compensation, which had improved from its very low position during the mid-1990s only to slide back down as budgets have been slashed. Though the state has begun pilot programs that implement differentiated pay scales, the report criticizes the state for failing to make more widespread changes to the pay scale that will make teaching more similar to other professions in its methods of compensation.
The state has done substantial work on teacher education and preparation, creating an Education Professional Standards Board and overseeing various initiatives designed to improve and streamline avenues to teacher certification. Efforts to align teacher preparation programs with state curriculum standards have begun, but the report encourages continued efforts to fully align Kentucky’s P-16+ curriculum. The report also underscores the import of fully funding teacher preparation programs.
Several recruitment and retention programs have been put in place in Kentucky, notably one that has successfully encouraged retirees to return to the profession. However, the report details the absence of any data on teaching conditions or teacher dissatisfaction that will allow meaningful initiatives to recruit and retain teachers, and recommends greater efforts in channeling teachers towards hard-to-staff schools and content areas.
Those professional development initiatives that Kentucky has implemented have received very positive reviews, and research performed in concert with these efforts has reconfirmed the link between strong professional development programs and successful schools. For this reason, the report recommends further aligning the programs with state curricula, creating uniform standards and guidelines, and, most significantly, improving funding to expand professional development programs.

The Prichard Committee’s report makes clear that, though a substantial foundation for teaching quality initiatives exists in Kentucky, putting a qualified teacher in every classroom remains a distant goal. Kentucky can propel its teaching force towards that goal by improving funding and pushing forward with an evolving schedule of reforms, but, as the report states, “the need remains just as great as it was five years ago…”