The Near Impossibility of Testing for Teacher Quality

(NCLB) mandated that a highly qualified teacher be in all our nation’s classrooms by aca-demic year 2005-2006. To accomplish this laud-able goal, each state must define what it means by a highly qualified teacher. States are permitted to use teacher licensure tests to demonstrate to the federal government that their teachers are highly qualified, that is, capable, competent, skilled, trained, practiced, and so forth. The the-ory of action behind the policy is that if Amer-ica’s teachers were of sufficiently high quality, then education would improve. But all this appears to be political spectacle (Smith, 2004); pure theater with no other pur-pose than to look like something positive is hap-