Features

SACRAMENTO — Imagine this: A public school in a poor, minority neighborhood where the teachers are all fully qualified, the buildings shine with new paint, each class has only 15 students and books and supplies are plentiful. 

Hard to imagine? 

It’s certainly not the case now, according to a new study being released Thursday by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning that says underqualified teachers are still concentrated in urban schools with mostly poor and minority students. 

But it could be so if state lawmakers, Gov. Gray Davis and local districts choose to concentrate efforts and shower resources on the 1,600 public schools where one in five teachers are underqualified, says the study. 

“We’re thinking, we need to flip the idea of low-performing schools around,” says Margaret Gaston, codirector of the nonprofit center based in Santa Cruz that focuses in improving teaching. Now, in most cases, teacher pay and working conditions are better in suburban districts than in the urban and rural schools with high concentrations of poor students who don’t score well on tests. 

Consequently, good, veteran teachers don’t want to work in the very low-performing schools that most need them. 

The education establishment should turn those low-performing schools into places where teachers want to work, says the study. 

“We need to make these schools compelling places to be. We can do that. We know how to do that. It will take political will and serious investment, but it’s possible to do,” Gaston said. 

The Legislature and Davis are currently working on their proposals for the 2001 session. The Assembly’s Select Committee on Low Performing Schools is holding a hearing Thursday to discuss the study and look at future legislation aimed at those schools. Davis makes his recommendations to the Legislature in January. 

Gaston says education officials need to concentrate additional resources in the lowest-performing schools to improve the learning conditions by making the buildings clean and safe, providing sufficient books and other materials linked to the state’s new rigorous standards and perhaps offering higher pay. 

State school Superintendent Delaine Eastin agrees. 

“I would say this is more challenging work than being a suburban teacher,” she said. “There should be a differential.” 

However, Wayne Johnson, president of the California Teachers Association, says giving some teachers higher pay has never worked in the past. In Los Angeles in the 1970s, officials gave a large bonus for working in “hard-to-staff schools,” he recalls. “They didn’t have any takers. It became known as combat pay. The community hated it, saying ’You have to pay teachers more to come in and teach our children.’ I don’t think pay will do it,” said the head of the state’s largest teachers’ union. 

The numbers have actually worsened since the center’s similar study a year ago. However, Gaston stresses that the effects of several new programs passed this year by Davis and the Legislature to recruit teachers to low-performing schools are not yet being felt. 

“The fact remains that the problem is so huge, it’s not going to be solved overnight. They’re going to have to maintain their focus and their interest in this issue over time in order to fully address this crisis,” Gaston said. 

The report found that in the 1999-2000 school year, more than 40,000 teachers, or about 14 percent, did not have a full state credential, meaning they have not taken the full five-year course that includes how-to-teach instruction. 

Eastin says the figure now is closer to 49,000, including 37,000 teachers working with “emergency” credentials, meaning they have graduated from college but need more teaching courses, plus 12,000 who are in intern programs or are teaching subjects outside their training. 

Those underqualified teachers, however, are not evenly distributed around the state. Thirty percent of schools, most of them in suburban areas, have no such teachers. 

In 24 percent of schools — up from 21 percent the year before — more than one-fifth of the teachers do not have full credentials. 

Those 1,600 schools with 1.5 million students are predominantly urban schools with mostly poor and minority students, says the study. 

In schools where 75 percent of the students qualify for free- or reduced-price lunches because of family poverty, an average of 22 percent of teachers are underqualified. 

In addition, the schools with the state’s lowest quarter of test scores have an average of 23 percent of teachers underqualified, says the study. 

The CTA is surveying its teachers and will present its own plan to improve teaching at low-performing schools by spring, Johnson said. 

He thinks the top recommendation is likely to be reducing class sizes in low-performing schools to about 15 to give teachers more time to work with kids who need more help. 

Class sizes now are 20 in most kindergarten-through-third grade classes and a few high school classes, but exceed 30 in most other grades. 

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On the Net: The center is at http://www.cftl.org