ACT to board: Loosen HQT requirements

The Association of Commonwealth Teachers is going to ask the Public School System Board of Education to reconsider the requirements set for Highly Qualified Teachers.

Under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, all teachers must be highly qualified by 2010. The NCLB act defines highly qualified as: holding a bachelor’s degree, meeting state certification requirements, and passing a state-approved teacher test. The Public School System decided to adopt the PRAXIS I and II exams as the state-approved tests.

PSS also decided that teachers who do not pass the PRAXIS exams will get a reduction in pay to a first year teacher’s salary, regardless of the years they have worked within the school system.

ACT president Betty Miller said the organization is concerned the test scores set by PSS were in comparison to U.S. states, while many of the teachers within the school system speak English as a second language and did not attend U.S.-based education institutions.

Some of the information on the tests is based on information that is learned in elementary or high school, Miller said.

“Yet we’re asking [non-U.S. teachers] to take the exams and compete with Americans,” she said. “If they weren’t qualified, why were they able to teach here for so long?”

Similar questions were raised in a September 2007 report prepared by the Pacific Resources for Education and Learning.

“The basic criteria of No Child Left Behind for highly qualified teachers may not themselves clearly identify effective teachers. So what makes a teacher effective?” the report said. It states, that through research, it has been found that a teacher’s content knowledge, teaching experience, and training and credentials are indicators for a teacher’s effectiveness.

Miller said that when the Board was setting the HQT qualification standards, teachers were informed federal funding would be reduced if the district did not follow the requirements set under the No Child Left Behind Act.

However, according to the report, requirements under the act have not been mandated for the jurisdictions within the Pacific region.

“So, there are no funding ramifications of violating requirements for highly qualified teachers,” the report, titled Preparing and Licensing High Quality Teachers in Pacific Region Jurisdictions, states.

Guam and the CNMI have adopted similar requirements to those in the NCLB Act for highly qualified teachers, “though they are not strictly held to them,” according to the report.

In 2005, then Education Commissioner Rita H. Inos was reported to have told Sen. Paul Manglona through a letter that PRAXIS is both a local and national requirement. Manglona had written to Inos seeking clarification on the requirements.

Miller said she has no problem with the Board of Education setting high standards for teachers, but feels PSS did not disclose the information fully when they decided to adopt the HQT requirements in 2006.

“If the Board had just been open in the beginning and said ‘look we have highly qualified teachers and want high standards’ that would have been OK…but the tone was set differently,” she said. “It feels like it was a betrayal.”

Miller said she wants to look into a House plan that would qualify veteran teaches under the NCLB Act. Although she has been advised by the U.S. Department of Education it is not recommended at such a late date, there is nothing stopping the CNMI to adopt such a measure.

To date, approximately 68 percent of the more than 500 PSS teachers have been deemed highly qualified.