California Reduces Underprepared Teachers

            California has reduced the number of underprepared teachers by more than 25,000 over the past five years, according to a new report released by The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning. There were 42,000 underprepared teachers in California in 2000-01, and just over 15,000 in 2006-07, a reduction from 14 percent of the workforce to just 5 percent. But the report also cautions that the gains in the supply of qualified teachers mask difficult problems.
Poor and minority students are still much more likely to have an underprepared teacher than their more advantaged white peers, and low achieving schools continue to face significant challenges in hiring qualified teachers. Additionally, the supply of teachers is threatened by declining production of new teachers and looming retirements of an aging teacher workforce. Further, California students are still not meeting the academic standards the state has set for them.
While test scores have shown gains, more than half of the state’s students still are not considered “proficient” on the California Standards Tests in English and mathematics, and the achievement gap between white and Asian students and African-American and Latino students has not narrowed. The Status of the Teaching Profession 2007 examines how quality is measured across key points in a teacher’s career – teacher preparation, hiring, and evaluation – and concludes that California currently does not have a coherent teacher development system that builds knowledge and skill.
In examining teacher development, the report finds that information about the knowledge, attitudes, and performance of teaching candidates is not used to strengthen preparation; hiring is based on weak data; and teacher evaluations are rarely based on meaningful data or used to improve teaching practice. Making matters worse, information is not shared across the components of the teacher development continuum to strengthen preparation programs, inform hiring decisions, and improve classroom practices.
The full report and summary materials are available on the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning website at www.cftl.org. Print versions of the report are also available. For additional information contact the Center at 831-427-3628 or by email at info@cftl.org.

— Teachers of Color