The Highly Qualified Teacher
By Edward J. McElroy

The end of this year is going to bring something that even veteran teachers have never experienced: the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law's "highly qualified teacher" deadline.

NCLB's "highly qualified teacher" (HQT) provision is an attempt to put a well-prepared and capable teacher in every classroom. While there are serious flaws in No Child Left Behind, including in its HQT provisions, most parents and teachers welcome the national effort to improve teacher quality, especially in disadvantaged communities. And certainly the push for teacher quality, which recognizes education as a national priority, is a welcome break from past efforts to eliminate the federal role in education.

Let's take a step back for a moment and think about what it would really take to put a highly qualified teacher in every classroom.

Teacher education
A comprehensive effort to improve teacher quality would have to address teacher education, state licensing exams, mentoring and professional development, as well as compensation. To address each of these factors, the AFT has made recommendations based on research and the experiences of our members.

We recommend that states require teaching candidates to have a firm grounding in subjects they're preparing to teach. Teachers also need access to up-to-date research about how to teach. For example, years of highly regarded research has led to a consensus on the best ways to teach reading, and teachers should have the opportunity to study these methods. Teacher candidates' clinical experience should occur in the classrooms of excellent teachers, take place over an extended period of time and include supervision by a college faculty member or other educator familiar with his or her coursework.

State licensing exams
No new teacher should enter the classroom without passing rigorous state licensing exams to measure whether the candidate has what it takes to succeed in the classroom. Some current entry-level teacher tests measure only low-level knowledge and skills and cut scores are not high enough to represent mastery of the material.

Mentoring
Graduation from a teacher education program should not be considered the end of training for teachers. A vigorous mentoring program should follow. Undergraduate work allows teacher candidates to acquire subject-matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and clinical training. But few new teachers are prepared to be completely independent in their initial teaching assignments. However, most new teachers, having been given a full workload, are then left to sink or swim.

The ideal mentoring program provides a reduced teaching load and an expert mentor. The reduced load allows time to observe master teachers, talk with colleagues about teaching and put to use the guidance offered by mentors who review the novice teachers' practices.

Professional development
We've helped many local affiliates operate professional development sessions under our Education Research and Dissemination initiative and established principles for all professional development programs.

No Child Left Behind needs to be fixed, and the AFT will do everything we can to make sure that its "highly qualified teacher" provisions are fair. But even if every teacher in the nation met the law's requirements, you and I both know we'd still need to do much more to improve teacher quality. We need to change the way we train and prepare new teachers, using the principles I've outlined above. Making those changes, along with providing better compensation, will go along way toward improving teacher quality.

Edward J. McElroy is the President of the American Federation of Teachers.