‘Dirty little secrets in education’
10-month investigation reveals inequities
in educational system

By FREDREKA SCHOUTEN
and LARRY BIVINS
Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON — Half of public schools serving minority children fill long-term teaching vacancies with substitutes, many of whom lack even basic teaching qualifications, a Gannett News Service investigation has found.

The problem is even more staggering at predominantly black schools, where nearly six out of 10 principals use substitutes. At schools with few black children, only about one in four principals use subs.

"This is one of the dirty little secrets in education," said University of Pennsylvania researcher Richard Ingersoll, an expert on teacher distribution who analyzed federal data for GNS.

GNS spent 10 months studying teaching quality at poor and minority schools. The investigation revealed that:

- Poor and minority students are the most likely to have teachers with the least experience.

- More than half of the nation's black and Hispanic middle school students are taught key academic subjects like math and English by teachers who lack at least a college minor in those subjects.

- Poor high school students are twice as likely as their middle-class and wealthy peers to be taught key subjects by teachers who lack state certification in those fields.

"This is as big a scandal as we have in public education," said Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, which lobbies on behalf of poor and minority children. "We basically have not been honest with either kids or with their parents — that we have been assigning significant numbers of teachers to teach subjects they really don't have much grounding in."

Those inequities outrage Karen Harvey of Palm Beach County, Fla.

Her son's ninth-grade English and social studies classes at Pahokee Middle-Senior High School were taught by substitutes for the entire 2001-02 school year. That's because school officials failed to lure enough qualified teachers to Pahokee, a predominantly black farming community 40 miles and a world away from the yacht clubs and palm-lined boulevards of coastal towns like Palm Beach.

."I don't have a problem with aides filling in for a short period of time, but it was a problem when somebody who doesn't know the subject turns around and teaches my child," Harvey said.

Substitutes need only 30 credit hours - less than two years of college education - to teach at the Pahokee school.
"My kids are being herded through," Harvey said. "They are not being taught."

Palm Beach County offers unusually stark contrasts in teacher quality. But Pahokee's problems are not unique. They are repeated at schools in high-poverty areas across the country.

Palm Beach County Schools Superintendent Art Johnson acknowledged the reasons for Harvey's anger. Some children already come to school with the disadvantage of poverty, he said.

"We are exacerbating that by who we have standing in front of the students," he said.

To be sure, teachers who lack full state licensing and substitutes — a convenient hiring option for principals - are not necessarily bad at their jobs.

"It doesn't mean they are not qualified," said T.J. Bucholz, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Education.
The GNS investigation analyzed information culled from the federal government's newest and most thorough survey of public school teachers and principals, along with interviews with education researchers, school officials and parents across the nation. The Schools and Staffing Survey was conducted during the 1999-2000 school year.

The last survey, conducted in the 1993-94 school year, found similar gaps in teacher quality. Little has changed.

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