The US Department of Education recently posted states' revised plans for putting a highly qualified teacher (HQT) in every classroom (a goal that was to have been met at the end of the last school year...NOT!). The plans leave a lot to be desired. Only nine states met all six of the Department's criteria for demonstrating that they were serious about trying to meet the HQT goal. Four states (Hawaii, Missouri, Utah, and Wisconsin) have been deemed "high-risk" for not having met any of the six criteria. These judgments are not final--the state plans are still undergoing peer review--but states are going to have to get it together as the Department seems to be showing some impressive backbone on this issue.

Ed Trust has been doing its own peer review, specifically of the sections of states' plans detailing their efforts to achieve equitable distribution of highly qualified teachers. The resulting effort, Missing the Mark, is a clear, concise policy brief--and pretty depressing.

Efforts have been paltry: only 10 states tracked whether minority students were getting their fair share of highly qualified teachers. Only three states--Nevada, Ohio, and Tennessee--managed to meet all the equity-related reporting requirements of NCLB. Nevada and Ohio in particular received strong praise from Ed Trust for going the extra mile to try to achieve equitable distribution.

While Ed Trust continues its important work on advocating for genuine implementation of NCLB--both the spirit and the letter of it--in other quarters the NCLB discussion is a little less helpful but enormously entertaining.

The NEA's set of recommendations for NCLB reauthorization brings out all the usual suspects: reduced class sizes, improved working conditions, opposition to performance pay, and so on. But it's on the teacher quality front that the NEA really shows some chutzpah:

* Certified special education teachers should be automatically granted "highly qualified" status in all academic areas. Everyone agrees that special ed teachers should get penthouse views in the afterlife. That's no reason, though, to exempt them from the need in this life to be knowledgeable about the subjects they teach.

* Teachers should get bonuses for attaining National Board certification, but they should also get smaller bonuses for merely trying to attain it. Last we checked, no one gets bonuses just for trying. If that were the case, we'd all get signing bonuses just for trying out as relief pitchers for the Mets.

* All teachers funded through ESEA, including charter school teachers and SES tutors, should be "highly qualified." This massive mandate would require thousands of folks to go into alternate route programs or ed schools. It would also greatly exacerbate shortages of highly qualified teachers, possibly adding fodder to the strangely widespread perception that unions sometimes do things in their own interests, rather than those of children.