The Sacramento Bee

Editorial: Across the great divide
Teacher gap hits poor schools hardest
By The Sacramento Bee Editorial Staff
Published by The Sacramento Bee, Thursday, December 11, 2003

California has made significant strides toward giving more public schoolchildren the single most important resource they need to succeed in this era of higher expectations: a qualified teacher. The 310,000-strong teacher work force last year included 37,000 teachers working without credentials. Although that means 12 percent of the state's teachers don't have credentials, it's still an improvement. Two years earlier, the state had 42,000 teachers working without credentials.

But this stubborn fact nonetheless remains: California children who most need good teachers are the least likely to get them. If you are a student attending a school with a large minority population (90 percent or more), you are five times as likely to have an underqualified teacher as a student at a school with few minorities (30 percent or less). Last year, 1,400 California schools - nearly one in five of the total -- had 20 percent or more of their teachers working without credentials.

This overconcentration of noncredentialed teachers in select, unfortunate schools -- often the very ones that are struggling to lift their Academic Performance Index rankings out of the basement -- ensures a chronic dysfunctionality that virtually guarantees these schools' place at the bottom. Is this how we plan to leave no child behind?

This mixed and not terribly encouraging news comes from the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, a Santa Cruz-based nonprofit organization that for the past five years has tracked and annually reported on the qualifications and distribution of teachers across the public school system. The report also notes that math teachers (15 percent), physical science teachers (13 percent) and life science teachers (12 percent) are slightly more likely to lack credentials than they were in the past. Special education remains the field with the highest proportion -- 18 percent -- of teachers working without full preparation. Teaching in any field is never simple, but these are the very fields where subject matter expertise and pedagogical training may be most necessary for success.

The center's message isn't likely to be warmly embraced by the busy Schwarzenegger administration, because it cries out for greater investment in a teacher preparation system that has already taken some whacks in this budget crisis. But it's a message that a governor who in his campaign spoke passionately about the educational needs of inner-city children cannot afford to ignore now that he is in office. With promising education reforms looking more fragile in the context of the budget crisis, and with a wave of higher enrollment moving toward the state's high schools coinciding with an aging teacher work force, California will ignore teacher preparation at its own peril.

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