Do Highly Science Qualified Teachers Provide High Quality Science Instruction? Evidence from the Boston Science Partnership
NCLB requires that all classrooms must be staffed with highly qualified teachers, which is defined as a teacher who has full certification or licensure, a college degree, and has demonstrated content mastery of the subject he or she teaches. This is more challenging in high school science where the science disciplines are compartmentalized, and certification for instruction requires licensure in the specific content areas of biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering. Thus, to be compliant with NCLB, administrators have the additional burden of hiring teachers with specific content mastery and assigning them to teach only those specific subjects.
While no one would argue against having highly qualified teachers in the classroom, the data show that out-of-field teaching in science has become a grave problem (see Ingersoll 1999, 2002, 2003). At the same time, the question remains whether qualifications alone necessarily ensure that science will be taught well. More fundamentally, no commonly accepted definition of high quality science instruction exists.
These gaps in understanding are relevant to the Boston Public Schools (BPS) and the Boston Science Partnership (BSP) and other districts where a great effort has been made to recruit, hire, and retain science teachers who meet the NCLB definition of highly qualified. As a result of these efforts, many new, young, qualified science teachers have been placed in the district's middle and high school science classrooms, however it is not known to what extent their preparation and qualifications has enabled them to teach their students well. Knowing more about the relationship between teachers' qualifications and their instruction will inform the field in general, and more specifically it will inform the way in which the BSP can target their professional development strategies.
