A Top-Heavy Approach Fails To Respect The Diverse Hiring Needs Of Individual School Districts

Looking to reinvigorate his presidential campaign and avoid further slippage in the polls, Vice President Al Gore has proposed doling out billions to boost teacher quality. He says this will ensure a highly qualified teacher in “every single classroom, everywhere in this nation.”

However, the vice president’s plan is little more than an empty promise. In a speech to a Michigan teachers union, Gore, who has already called for a $115 billion increase in funding for the Department of Education, upped the ante and proposed an additional $16 billion to hire a million new teachers over the next 10 years.

Supposedly, his plan would reduce by half the 2 million new instructors needed over the next decade to fill the nation’s so-called teacher shortage.

While the Clinton administration and the vice president have made the looming teacher shortage a major focus, the nation already hires an average of 2 million teachers a decade even without massive new spending increases, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The vice president wants to spend $8 billion on signing bonuses and loan forgiveness programs for candidates who agree to teach in low- performing schools and to allocate an additional $8 billion to districts that adopt his methods for boosting teacher quality.

One of the vice president’s pet programs is national teacher certification. While the option has existed for over 10 years with government support, few districts have adopted the program, and empirical evidence suggests national certification does not have much impact on student performance.

In order to receive federal funds, states would also be required to test all teachers in their respective subjects, while elementary-school teachers would be tested in reading instruction. The kicker is these tests must comply with teacher standards developed by a Gore administration.

The federal government should not prescribe instructional methods for public-school teachers. Across the country, 38 states already test their teachers. The problem with many low-performing schools is that they lack qualified candidates in certain subject areas.

For example, among math teachers in high-poverty high schools, only 43 percent have a college major or minor in the field they teach. This figure is 20 percent higher in more affluent districts.

Gore’s top-heavy approach fails to respect the diverse hiring needs of school districts, while imposing significant costs on them. His plan to recruit a million new teachers would provide only 32 cents an hour for each teacher hired, shifting the balance to state and local governments.

Gore is a recent convert to improving teacher quality. As recently as last year, he opposed legislation on Capitol Hill that would have provided states more federal money to spend on teacher recruitment and improvement provided academic gains followed. Meaningful reforms that boost performance usually begin at the local level rather than on high.

Governors and local leaders in Georgia, California, Pennsylvania and other states have already taken the lead in designing innovative approaches to boosting teacher quality.

Gov. Roy Barnes of Georgia has spearheaded legislation to replace teacher tenure with performance contracts. If student performance and graduation rates improve, Georgia teachers are eligible for a $2,000 annual bonus.

In Los Angeles, Calif., the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center serves more than 1,000 children in grades K-5, with 99 percent qualifying for the free lunch program. As a charter school, Vaughn is allowed to consolidate much of its federal funding.

Despite high poverty, the school has made steady academic progress in recent years. The federal government should learn from the successful experiments in the states.

Before mandating its own priorities, Washington should allow states and local schools to drive the reform movement, providing them with increased flexibility while demanding results. This was a lesson the vice president’s boss never learned, which he is poised to repeat.

Thomas Dawson is a Policy Fellow at the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute. He can be reached via email at tdawson@pacificresearch.org.