LOW STANDARDS

A U.S. Department of Education report released last week ranked Maine as having some of the lowest standards in the nation for teacher certification. So low, in fact, that Education Secretary Rod Paige singled Maine out for a scolding in his remarks that day at a national conference on teacher quality evaluation.

The report, “Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge,” was wrong. In compiling it, USDOE mistakenly used Maine’s test scores for prospective vocational teachers – plumbers, electricians, mechanics and the like – who do not have college degrees but who are seeking certification to teach those trades only in secondary vocational-technical programs. For all other states, USDOE used the test scores for prospective teachers pursuing four-year academic degrees.

Of the 29 states that use the same Pre-Professional Skills Test, Maine was ranked in the report as 14th in reading, 16th in math and

29th – a scold-worthy last – in writing. Had USDOE used the right numbers, the scores of degree candidates as it did with all other states, it would have ranked third in reading, fourth in math and second in writing. Rather praise-worthy.

The report was released last Tuesday, June 11, with printed copies sent to members of Congress and a posting for everyone else on the department’s Web site; the same day, Secretary Paige held Maine up for ridicule at the conference. The Maine Department of Education spotted the error immediately and, with the assistance of Rep. John Baldacci, got USDOE to make the necessary correction.

Eventually and sort of. Although notified of its mistake last Tuesday, the version on the Web site was not corrected until Friday afternoon. Rather than reprint the entire 77-page report, USDOE plans merely to insert an errata sheet in the already printed – and wrong – reports that will be distributed in the future (the department says it will send errata sheets to those who already received a printed version as soon it figures who they are). As of a week later, there is no notice of this error on the Web site – those who downloaded the report between last Tuesday and Friday afternoon have no way of knowing their version is wrong. Secretary Paige’s remarks, also posted on the Web, have been – ahem – amended with no acknowledgment that what he said in public was untrue.

As for the notoriety Maine gained in the national media, the department has no clue how widespread it may be. As for the obvious discrepancy between Maine’s consistently high rankings in student assessment scores and its reportedly low rankings in teacher quality, USDOE apparently saw nothing.

Most troubling, though, is that this report on the status of teacher quality is the first major initiative undertaken by USDOE in the federal government’s new role as watchdog of state and local education under the No Child Left Behind Act passed by Congress in February. The powers afforded this federal department are considerable – it essentially will be able to declare state and local efforts as deficient and it will have the authority to prescribe corrective action and even impose punitive measures. This erroneous report does not bode well. The department’s reluctance to admit its error and to take full corrective action reveals where the low standards truly reside.