Compete or Litigate?

Earlier this week I received a press release from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) annoucing, with enthusiasm, that "a coalition of parents, students, community groups, and legal advocates sued the United States Department of Education and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings for violating the teacher quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act."

The essence of the suit is this: NCLB requires all teachers to be "highly qualified," the components of which include full certification by the state in which the teacher happens to live. In most states, a prerequesite for full certification is completion of an approved teacher training program--i.e. the programs represented by AACTE. But some states also have "alternative certification" programs that allow teachers to skip the teacher prep program, or start teaching first and complete the program while they're on the job. Alt-cert is what allows programs like Teach for America, which puts freshly-minted graduates of top colleges directly into the classroom (after an intensive summer training program run by TFA itself, not an AACTE institution), to exist. AACTE is saying that under the NCLB "highly qualified" definition, alt-cert programs are illegal.

Leaving the legal issues aside (and as the Gadfly pointed out this week, NCLB is ambiguous and perhaps even contradictory on this point), here's what this boils down to:

We have a group of colleges and universities, represented by AACTE, who are selling a service.

We have a group of people who want to be teachers who don't want to buy the service.

We have a group of school districts who want to hire those teachers, knowing full well that they haven't bought the service.

We have a lot of research, like this, saying that the service, and the certification process to which it's tied, seems to have very little impact on the likelihood of a teacher succeding in the classroom.

Faced with this situation, AACTE members have two options: 1) Improve the quality of their service and convince people it's worth buying. 2) Sue the federal government to compel people to spend a lot of time and money on something they don't want and which research says they don't need.

That they chose (2) says a lot.