Left Behind

Low-income kids face instructional inequality

In January 2001, just days after taking the oath of office, President George W. Bush announced a sweeping education reform program that he hoped would be "the cornerstone of my administration." Passed with bipartisan support, the new law was meant to ensure, through annual reading and math testing, that students in grades one through eight were meeting proficiency standards set by the states. Schools that failed to measure up would face progressively tougher penalties, up to and including closure.

"If children are trapped in schools that will not teach and will not change, there has to be a different consequence," Bush told the Joint Congressional Education Leadership Group at the time.

Seven years later, education scholars are still debating how effective the No Child Left Behind Act, or NCLB, has been in improving public education. Now a new study, led by Motoko Akiba, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy analysis, indicates that students in the nation's low-income, resource-poor school districts -- precisely the group the act was meant to target -- are far less likely to be taught by the highly-qualified teachers they need to meet the NCLB standards.

The study found, for example, that 30 percent of U.S. eighth grade math teachers did not major in math or math education. The international average is 14.6 percent.

What's more, Akiba says, only about 60 percent of American eighth graders are taught mathematics by highly-qualified teachers -- highly-qualified, in this instance, meaning teachers with full certification, or math or mathematics education majors with at least three years experience. Some 68 percent of wealthy students are taught by highly qualified teachers; only 53 percent of poor students are.

Akiba says she's not confident NCLB's requirements, though well meaning, will be enough to address this "opportunity gap" in American education. "There is a gap in learning opportunities for teachers," says Akiba. "In order to close the opportunity gap in the United States, teachers should have equal opportunities to learn and to expand their knowledge in their field."

Key to providing this, she says, is narrowing the funding deficit between low- and high-income districts. Even in high-poverty areas, the data shows kids can succeed with the right kind of teacher. Says Akiba: "Previous studies have shown that students with similar backgrounds achieve significantly higher when taught by highly qualified teachers."

Akiba's study, conducted with Gerald K. LeTendre, a professor of educational theory and policy at Penn State, and Jay P. Scribner, an associate professor at MU, was published in the October 2007 edition of the journal Educational Researcher.

Published by the Office of Research.

©2009 Curators of the University of Missouri. Click here to contact the editor.