Federal appeals court: Teaching interns illegally rated as qualified

[alp227]

(09-28) 14:45 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- California has violated federal law by classifying thousands of inexperienced, noncredentialed teachers as "highly qualified" and assigning them to schools with heavily low-income and minority enrollments, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

The ruling by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco was a victory for impoverished families in Richmond, Hayward and Los Angeles who filed suit in 2007. They claimed their schools were saddled with disproportionate numbers of untrained interns because of federal and state regulations that flouted federal law.

The appeals court ruled 2-1 against the families in July 2009, saying the federal No Child Left Behind Act leaves such decisions largely up to the states. On Monday, after reviewing further arguments, the same panel reversed itself, reinterpreted the law and ruled 2-1 against the government.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/28/BALM1FKJOB.DTL

[Reader Rabbit]

1. I wonder if they were Teach for America interns. - n/t

[mzteris]

2. judge's comments - interesting -

". . .at issue are teachers with what California defines as "intern" credentials, who are on a path to completing alternative certification but have not yet achieved it. The lawsuit argues that 41 percent of teaching interns in California teach in the 25 percent of schools with the highest concentrations of minority students.

"In adopting NCLB, Congress decided that teachers with 'full State certification' are, in the aggregate, better teachers than those without such certification," Judge Fletcher wrote. "We recognize that it is debatable whether Congress was correct in deciding that teachers with 'full State certification' are in fact better than teachers without such certification."

This is especially debatable if many of the interns come from programs such as Teach for America, the judge said. But the disparate assignment of teachers without full state certification to minority classrooms means the plaintiff families have suffered "injuries in fact" that give them standing to sue, Judge Fletcher said."

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/school_law/2010/09/federal_highly_qualified_teach.html

[Hannah Bell]

3. Thanks for your usual spin, but there's also been a national study documenting their superiority.

The deformers are sending the worst teachers to poor districts in aid of their effort to shut down & privatize.