Cloaking Inequity

This is why the Civil Rights data collection by DoEd is so important. EdWeek published a piece entitled Black Students Less Likely to Be Taught By Certified Teachers, Ed. Dept. Data Show. A few months ago Cloaking Inequity took up this issue in the post Whats Good for Goose, is Good for Gander: Feds propose changes to Civil Rights data I wrote at the time:

That brings us to the federal governments request to no longer keep track of this huge influx of teachers with a modicum of training to “pilot” our classrooms. The Department of Education is seeking public comments on the Civil Rights Data Collection process for 2013-2016. The feds have decided that it is no longer necessary to keep track of the FTE of teachers meeting all state licensing/certification requirements. The feds have also decided these data points are also no longer important for Civil Rights:

• Number of students awaiting special education evaluation (LEA)
• Whether students are ability grouped for English/Math
• Harassment and bullying policies (LEA)
• Number of students enrolled in AP foreign language(disaggregated by race, sex, disability, LEP)
• Number of students who took AP exams for all AP courses enrolled in (disaggregated by race, sex, disability,  LEP)
• Number of students who passed AP exams for all AP courses enrolled in (disaggregated by race, sex, disability, LEP
• Total personnel salaries

What do you think about this explosion of  inexperiece teachers with limited training disproportionately assigned to our nation’s poor in urban and rural areas? Are you annoyed? Outraged? You can comment on the proposed removal of a survey items.

The data through 2012 showed this according to Edweek:

Students of color are more likely to be taught by underqualified teachers, novice teachers, or teachers with lower salaries than their peers, according to national data from the 2011-12 school year released today by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. The data confirms a host of other research.

The Civil Rights Data Collection takes place biennially, and is gathered primarily so that the department has the information it needs to enforce civil rights laws that provide for equal educational opportunities for students of different races, genders, disabilities, and English-speaking skills. Teacher equity is actually a fairly new addition to the collection. It was first collected in 2009-10, but only for a sample of schools and districts. So the data released today represent the first comprehensive figures based on reporting from every single district.

Black students appeared to be the hardest hit by such inequities. In one startling finding, nearly 7 percent of black students attended schools where more than 20 percent of teachers hadn’t yet met all state certification requirements. That figure was more than four times higher than for white students (1.5 percent) and more than twice as high than for Latino students (3 percent). Much other research shows that poor and minority teachers tend to have out-of-field or otherwise unqualified teachers…

Researchers have also shown over and over that novice teachers, particularly those in their first year, are less effective on average than experienced teachers. Yet Black, Latino, American Indian, and Native Alaskans were more likely to be in schools with a concentration of novices than their white peers, according to the OCR data.

And at the high school level, nearly a quarter of districts with at least two high schools had a $5,000 gap in teacher salaries between schools with the highest and lowest concentration of black and Latino students.

Ever ponder why they don’t want to collect data on who is getting uncertified and under qualified teachers? Cloaking Inequity. Are there any readers out there that know whether the feds are going to continue to collect the FTE of teachers meeting all state licensing/certification requirements?

For all of Cloaking Inequity’s post on Teacher Quality click here.

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Thanks to Dr. Barb Veltri for the heads up on the EdWeek Article.