Finding and keeping qualified middle school and special-education teachers will prove difficult under new, more-stringent state credential requirements for teachers, school district officials said Thursday.
The new requirements, approved this week by the California Board of Education, mark the state's effort to comply with President Bush's federal education law, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The act requires schools to employ only "highly qualified" teachers by the 2005-06 school year.
To be deemed highly qualified, new teachers will have to be fully credentialed and, in the case of high school and middle school teachers, educated or tested in the subjects they teach. Veteran teachers who don't have degrees in their subjects will have to pass a test be or evaluated by their school district.
Teachers working under emergency credentials or waivers or in pre-internship programs will not be considered highly qualified under the plan. Districts will have to notify parents if their students' teachers are not deemed highly qualified.
San Joaquin County districts employ hundreds of teachers who won't make the cut. In Stockton Unified, the county's largest school district, more than 200 teachers are in pre-internship programs or have emergency credentials that won't meet the new standards, said Janet Correa, a personnel analyst for the district.
With a multibillion-dollar budget deficit resulting in layoff notices for thousands of teachers across the state, finding qualified elementary and high school teachers who meet the new threshold should not be difficult, officials said. "There's a lot of credentialed teachers who are going to be on the street," Allyn Bulzomi, Stockton Unified's assistant superintendent of personnel, said Thursday. "Finding credentialed teachers is going to be a lot easier that it has been."
But the new requirements could make keeping longtime middle school teachers and finding qualified special-education teachers troublesome, officials said.
Many veteran middle school teachers have been working imder multisubject credentials and without formal education in the subjects they teach, and they might be hesitant to take extra courses, study for a test or undergo a formal evaluation, officials said.
In fact, many teachers who do not have degrees in subjects such as math or English are doing a great job of teaching those subjects, said Len Casanega, Lodi Unified's assistant superintendent of personnel. Officials said teachers close to retirement may not want to endure taking a test or being evaluated.
Also, because special-education teachers are in such high demand, districts often hire them without permanent credentials, officials said. In Lodi Unified, more than one in five special-education teachers hold credentials that don't meet the new standard, said Robin Hazelwood, a personnel technician in the district.
Increasing the standards for these teachers may create an even larger shortage of these teachers, whose highly bureaucratic and time-consuming jobs are difficult to fill, officials said.
"It's a tough job," Bulzomi said. "It's a national shortage. There's not a district in the country that's not looking for special-ed teachers."