New federal law makes interns qualified to teach EDUCATION 11th-hour legislation voids U.S. court ruling requiring state credential to instruct

Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close New federal law makes interns qualified to teach 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Thousands of teachers in training in California will keep their "highly qualified" instructor labels and can be regularly assigned to low-income and minority areas, following Congress' last-minute approval of legislation that was supported by a Bay Area lawmaker and the Obama administration.

Passed in the final days of Congress' lame-duck session, the legislation nullifies a recent ruling by an appeals court in San Francisco that said federal law reserved the status of highly qualified teacher for those who hold state credentials.

The ruling, which had not yet taken effect, would have required schools to notify parents whenever interns were teaching their children, and would have ended the practice of filling a district's most-demanding jobs with its least-experienced instructors.

Opponents - poor families in Richmond, Hayward and Los Angeles - who brought the case to the San Francisco court, and advocacy organizations that supported them - are indignant about what lawmakers did and how they did it.

The legislation was buried in an unrelated federal spending bill that was amended with little public notice and no hearings, said attorney John Affeldt of Public Advocates, a San Francisco nonprofit law firm that has fought the state and federal governments over the issue for seven years.

"Significantly modifying the standard of teacher quality owed every child in the nation is not something that should happen ... behind closed doors in an appropriations bill," he said.

Supporters of the legislation said their hands were forced by a court decision that would have rewritten the rules for teacher placements before Congress had a chance to deliberate them.

Allowing the court ruling to take effect "could cause major and unpredictable disruptions to schools across the country," said Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. He said the government's "current measures of teacher quality are inadequate" and should be reassessed by Congress, not the courts.

Miller's amendment

In the meantime, however - under a Miller-backed amendment drafted to stay in effect until mid-2013 - schools in California and elsewhere will remain free to assign noncredentialed instructors to the schools arguably most in need of experienced teachers.

The state Department of Education says California had about 5,000 interns among its 306,000 teachers in 2008-09. Affeldt said the current figure is around 8,000.

According to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' Sept. 27 ruling, evidence from plaintiffs in the lawsuit showed that 62 percent of the interns in California were in the poorest half of the state's schools.

Racially, the plaintiffs said, nearly one-quarter of California's interns teach in schools with 98 to 100 percent minority enrollment. And about half the interns teach special education classes for the disabled.

Affeldt, lead attorney in the lawsuit, said the congressional action means "low-income communities of color have to endure another 2 1/2 years of underprepared teachers."

The other side of the debate is that schools, suffering from nationwide deficits of funding, staff and morale, need to attract motivated newcomers with fresh ideas.

The ruling that denied "highly qualified" status to interns would "interfere with school reform efforts across the country," Teach for America, which recruits new college graduates for two-year teaching assignments in difficult areas, said in a court filing. The organization argued that noncredentialed instructors in "alternative certification" programs, with state-supervised training, "are just as effective as teachers who have already completed a traditional certification program, if not more so."

Behind the dispute

The dispute stems from the No Child Left Behind Act, the centerpiece of President George W. Bush's education program.

Under that law, all students learning core academic subjects are supposed to have "highly qualified" teachers. Schools can assign less-qualified instructors during teacher shortages, but must notify parents when they do so, and must also distribute the instructors evenly through a district, rather than concentrating them in the poorest areas.

The law says a teacher must obtain "full state certification" to be highly qualified. Regulations adopted in 2002 by the Bush administration, and in 2004 by a California commission appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, allowed noncredentialed interns to be considered highly qualified if they were in state-approved training programs and were making progress toward certification.

The appeals court, in a 2-1 ruling, said the regulations violate the law by putting interns in the same category as fully credentialed teachers, a change that "impermissibly expands" the law's definition.

While it's debatable that credentialed teachers are always better than interns, the court said, lawmakers who passed No Child Left Behind decided that students are better off with teachers who have full state certification.

The Obama administration, which defended the regulations, sought a rehearing from the full appeals court, which put the case on hold while it considered the request.

But a quiet lobbying campaign by supporters of the regulations succeeded in mid-December when congressional negotiators added language to a must-pass government funding bill that classified interns in state-approved programs as highly qualified teachers.

Both houses approved it without debate, and President Obama signed the measure Dec. 21.

"We applaud Congress for taking this important step to ensure that teachers in high-quality alternative route programs can remain in the classroom," said Jane Glickman, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education.

Critics won't give up

Affeldt fumed that the administration was misrepresenting the court ruling, which would have required schools to reassign interns but not to fire them. The attorney said opponents aren't giving up and plan to raise the issue when Congress debates the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind in the coming year.

The case "got the civil rights community's attention and the disability-rights community's attention," Affeldt said. "I think the Obama administration needs to hear that."