In a bid to eliminate the achievement gap between rich and poor children, the federal government is requiring that all teachers be "highly qualified" by the end of June 2006.

It's a daunting task for a state facing a persistent teacher shortage but no one knows how daunting.

The reason? Two years after the federal No Child Left Behind Act was signed, the state is just now completing regulations that define "highly qualified." There are no reliable statistics on how many teachers would meet the criteria, and the local school officials responsible for enforcing regulations still haven't seen them in their final form.

For special-education teachers, the situation is more muddied. The federal requirements call for secondary teachers to demonstrate competence in every core academic subject they teach.

That requirement has been criticized as being unrealistic for people who teach special-education classes that cover multiple subjects. It may be eliminated or modified when Congress passes a new version of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act later this year, but exactly how is unclear.

California's draft regulations also have come under fire from critics who claim they're too easy to pass, and will do little to improve teacher quality. Teachers with less experience and training tend to be concentrated in schools serving mostly minority, low-income children.

"This provision in No Child Left Behind was very much designed to protect those students because that's where the achievement gaps are," said Kevin Carey, senior policy analyst for the Education Trust, a Washington-based think tank. "If we don't set a sufficiently rigorous standard and just try to pass everyone through, then we've wasted an opportunity."

State and federal officials responsible for implementing the law say California's standards make sense, and that state officials are working hard to improve teacher quality.

"We're at the very beginning stage but so far I'm encouraged," said Carolyn Snowbarger, a special assistant for teacher quality at the U.S. Department of Education who helps oversee states' efforts. "I sense a real commitment from them that they meet the goal."

DEFINING "HIGHLY"

The basic requirements are simple: to be "highly qualified," teachers must earn a bachelor's degree, have a state teaching credential or intern credential, and be able to demonstrate competency in the core subjects they teach.

It gets complicated, though, when you start defining subject-matter competence and how to measure it.

Teachers who received credentials on or after July 1, 2002, have limited options. Elementary teachers must pass a state-approved competency test. Secondary teachers can fulfill the requirement with a college major, the equivalent of a college major or a graduate degree in their field, or by passing a state test in that field.

More experienced teachers have those options, plus a few more. Secondary teachers can prove competency by getting national board certification in teaching their field, but that process is so challenging and intense, it's unlikely that teachers would do it just to comply with the requirement.

More importantly, veteran teachers at both the elementary and secondary levels can demonstrate subject-matter competency by completing the High Objective Uniform State Standard of Evaluation.

Despite its name, critics question whether California's draft of the standards are high enough or objective.

REQUIREMENTS

Each state gets to set its own high-objective requirements, within the boundaries of the law.

Under California's proposed standards, a teacher needs 100 points on the high-objective scoring scale to be considered competent. Teachers can get up to 50 points just for teaching experience, with 10 points for each year of teaching in the field.

Teachers also can get points for other activities related to their subject areas, such as completing college course work or graduate degrees, attending teacher training or taking part in professional leadership activities.

Even if they don't make it to 100 based on those factors, they can still get extra credit by successfully completing classroom observations by an administrator in their district or a portfolio demonstrating their teaching.

The portfolio would consist of lesson plans, student assignments and analysis of student performance and notes from the reviewer.

"It's unusual for a state to do this," said Carey, who added he wasn't aware of any other state that offered a similar option. "To me, that just dilutes the standard."

While a classroom observation or teaching portfolio might be appropriate for assessing how well a teacher understands pedagogy, Carey said, that's not the point of the subject-matter competence requirement.

"This provision is very specifically about what teachers need to know, not what teachers need to do," he said. "I question the extent to which you can observe subject-matter knowledge."

Carey also questioned whether a process that's based on a school administrator using professional judgment is really an objective measure of teacher quality.

An official with the California Teachers Association, which was influential in the drafting process for the state's regulations, said observations are an effective way of assessing teachers' knowledge.

School districts and administrators bear the burden of doing it professionally, in a way consistent with the regulations, but the fact that they might do it wrong doesn't mean the technique is invalid, said Justo Robles, manager of the union's Instruction and Professional Development Department.

"If administrators do the right thing to implement it correctly, then it will work," he said.

Sam Poindexter, president of the Fontana Teachers Association, said his teachers would want it to be objective. The more clear-cut the scoring system, he said, the less likely it would be that an administrator would flunk a teacher for reasons that were unjustified or, worse yet, malicious.

"I don't think we have a lot of administrators in Fontana who would do that, but it happens," he said.

DIFFERENT NEEDS

Getting through the high-objective evaluation will be fairly easy for many experienced teachers, officials predicted.

But for some special-education and alternative-education teachers, it will be considerably harder.

The law says secondary-school teachers must demonstrate competence in every core academic subject they teach. For teachers in settings where they teach the same set of children all day, it's not clear what that would mean.

In Jamie Gill's class at Rialto High School, all 10 students have cerebral palsy, and all have either severe or profound learning disabilities. None can talk, and only some can understand spoken language, Gill said.

At one computer recently, a boy in a wheelchair was playing an instructional computer game in which he matched objects to the sounds they make. Other children listened to a tape of multiplication tables, although it was unclear whether they understood it. One girl clearly liked to play with books, although she cannot read, Gill said.

Instruction is focused on very basic ideas, like cause and effect.

"You hit a switch and the radio goes on," Gill said. "You hit a switch and a bell rings."

Gill and her two aides spend much of their time keeping students comfortable and attending to their medical needs.

"It's not really an academically focused class," she said.

It's unclear whether Gill and other teachers of the severely learning-disabled are teaching any core subjects as envisioned by the law, or if so, how many.

"We've asked the U.S. Department of Education the same question, and we haven't gotten clarification from them," said Penni Hansen, a consultant for the state Department of Education.

Common sense suggests they are not, Hansen said.

"We'll see whether they're going to accept that," said Terry McLaughlin, assistant superintendent for student services at the county Superintendent of Schools Office, which runs many special-education programs, including the one Gill teaches in.

The issue is dicier for teachers like Tim West, who teaches a special day class for seventh- and eighth-graders at Mary P. Henck Intermediate School in Lake Arrowhead.

West mainly teaches language arts and math to learning-disabled children. His students are generally able to participate in some classes with regular-education students but have a range of problems that make learning difficult.

In math, for example, West said his instruction mainly focuses on arithmetic, with a few more advanced concepts like negative numbers and simple equations.

"Once I get them to a certain level, my job is to put them into regular ed with the experts," he said.

Very few special-education teachers have credentials in specific academic fields, and it's not feasible for him and others like him to become specialists in all the fields they teach, he said.

West said he's pretty confident the requirements will be relaxed, but others said they're not sure how much.

"I don't know how they're going to figure it out," said Bryan Shaw, assistant superintendent for personnel services at the Rim of the World Unified School District which serves part of the San Bernardino Mountains.

The landscape may change this year if Congress decides to modify the requirements for special-education teachers in the latest version of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The law, which sets standards for special education and provides for federal programs for disabled students, must be reauthorized by Congress every five years.

A version passed by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee relaxes the requirements for secondary-school special-education teachers who primarily teach students with significant cognitive disabilities.

It's ready to be considered by the full Senate, but no date has been set, committee spokesman Joshua Shields said.

A version already passed by the House contains no change in the requirements, but people on the House side are also looking at reducing the burden on special-education teachers, said Daniel Weiss, a spokesman for Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, the committee's ranking Democrat.

"In the conference committee, we would hopefully insert language that would address the issue," he said. "It's certainly not going to happen before March."

If necessary, the state would then adopt regulations implementing the change, said Phil Garcia, deputy executive director of the state Board of Education.

HARD TO RECRUIT

School districts in San Bernardino County and up and down the state are already having trouble recruiting enough qualified special-education teachers.

"It's a national issue," said Marilyn Errett, administrator in the Office of Governmental Relations of the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

The problem is worst in schools with high populations of minority students throughout the state, according to statistics compiled by SRI International for the Santa Cruz-based Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning.

West attributed part of the problem to the extensive legal requirements and paperwork now involved in special education, which he said frustrate teachers and take time away from kids.

"A lot of special-ed teachers are getting out of special ed," he said. At his school, he said, "we've got four special-education teachers that are teaching regular ed because they can't handle the paperwork."

Even advocates of tougher teacher-quality standards, like Carey, are uneasy about requiring special-education teachers to get trained as if they're teaching every academic subject to regular-education students.

"I don't have a real easy answer to that question, to be honest with you, particularly for special education," he said. "Certainly we don't think you should require special-education teachers to go back and get five different bachelor's degrees."

ALTERNATIVE SCHOOLS

The state does not plan on adopting a separate set of regulations for teachers in alternative schools or small schools, Garcia said.

That's a problem for agencies, like the county schools office, which run alternative-education programs too small to employ a teacher for each core subject area.

In many of the office's community day schools, the school consists of a single teacher in leased storefront space teaching all the core subjects to a single class. Getting all those teachers to demonstrate competence in all the core subjects is just unrealistic, McLaughlin said.

"That's what's going to drive us crazy," he said. "We wish that someone from the federal government would come here and visit these programs, so they would see that it's not realistic to expect that."

The federal government has shown little willingness to offer states flexibility for such programs, however.

"When we asked the question the response is, 'Be creative. Use things like distance learning," said Hansen, the state official.

Another sticky problem is the county's Juvenile Court schools, which are run at juvenile halls. There, students are not allowed to mix with students from other units for security reasons. That means they must be taught by the same teachers all day, McLaughlin said.

"There's a lot of court cases that suggest that security issues in juvenile facilities and prisons take precedence" over educational issues, he said.

The new requirements could also force changes in some middle schools that use a "core" system, or one that involves having faculty members teach two subjects to the same group of students, usually either language arts and social studies or science and math.

Some teachers who've taught core for a number of years may be able to demonstrate competence in both subjects using the High Objective Uniform State Standard of Evaluation. In some cases, however, middle schools using the core approach may have to switch back to a traditional department system, like that used in high schools.

"We may have to do some realignment of what we teach in middle schools," said Sherri Black, director of certificated human resources for the Fontana Unified School District.

McLaughlin emphasized that he supports the purpose of the "highly qualified" teacher requirement.

"Who can argue with every teacher being highly qualified? But it comes down to how you define that," he said.

IRATE TEACHERS

For many teachers, the biggest problem with the "highly qualified" teacher requirement is symbolic. Having spent years or decades teaching, they take umbrage at the idea of suddenly being asked to prove they're competent.

"That's an insult to the educators, especially our experienced educators who've spent so much time in the classroom," said Rich Laabs, president of the Redlands Teachers Association.

It reflects a sense by some teachers that their profession isn't getting the respect it deserves.

"Everybody I've worked with, we've never worked harder and we've never been rewarded less," said West, the special-education teacher in Lake Arrowhead.

The criticism also dovetails with broader critiques several teachers expressed about No Child Left Behind, including demands for improvements in student performance they characterized as unrealistic and the use of sanctions on schools that fail to meet those demands. Some teachers said they're frustrated with the level of control elected officials have asserted over the education system.

"My concern really is the fact that in the higher echelons of government, somehow we're getting decisions made by politicians and people who are not professionals in education," said Nancy Hofrock, a fifth-grade teacher at Cypress Elementary School in Fontana.

Even though the requirements are manageable for most teachers, Hofrock said she worries they may get frustrated and simply leave.

"It's going to overwhelm a lot of people and drive them out of the teaching profession," she said. "That's my big concern."

That said, teachers and administrators predicted the overwhelming majority of veteran teachers will be found to be highly qualified.

"The (high-objective evaluation) section is going to take care of a lot of our teachers," Laabs said.

Snowbarger, the federal official, said she's not worried about California's progress.

"Obviously, it's much easier for teachers when they know what they need to do," she said. "The people have 2 to get additional pieces and get the professional development. To me, that's a very doable task."