For the first time this year, school report cards include information about teacher qualifications.
But a Tribune analysis suggests the data is unreliable, marred by inaccuracies in schools’ self-reported findings and confusion over definitions.
Only 20 percent of nearly 4,000 schools statewide, for instance, reported having even a single class taught by a “not highly qualified” teacher.
“We’ll see more reliable and more substantial data next year,” said H. Lee Milner of the State Board of Education. “The schools had to interpret for themselves how to report the data, and they tried to do the best they could.”
The new federal education reform requires all schools to report the percentage of teachers with emergency/provisional certificates and the percentage of classrooms not taught by “highly qualified” teachers. But schools didn’t get the definition of those categories until months after they reported the data.
The state has since limited the “highly qualified” rank to fully certified teachers teaching the subject and in grade level for which they are qualified. Given the confusion over the state definition, many schools chose to report teachers without full certification as emergency/provisional, rather than as “not highly qualified,” rendering suspect totals in both categories.
Two-thirds of all schools statewide didn’t report a single teacher in either category, suggesting an unlikely scenario in which every teacher in those schools is fully certified and teaching in his or her field.
In La Grange District 105, for example, officials reported that all teachers were fully certified, even though two of the district’s bilingual teachers have provisional certificates. Supt. James Ewing said he didn’t know when the data were reported that those teachers would not be considered highly qualified.
