She's helped them build machines that demonstrate the force-reduction properties of pulleys, and shown them how to make tortilla soup for the whole school as the finale of their Spanish lessons.
According to federal No Child Left Behind standards, Towne may be just as highly qualified in her first year on the job as colleague Judy Crawford is with 28 years of experience at Woodman.
Last month, Montana received word that it was one of nine states in danger of losing federal funding for failing to make a “good-faith effort in meeting the HQT (highly qualified teacher) goal,” according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Last week, Montana Superintendent of Schools Linda McCulloch got a letter acknowledging the state may have solved the problem. But as far as the Office of Public Instruction was concerned, Montana never had a problem in the first place.
“If we were a state with low NAEP scores and Iowa scores in the 36th percentile, and only had 65 percent of our teachers licensed, we'd need a lot more work,” McCulloch said Thursday. “But we're a state with 99 percent of our teachers properly licensed. Our test scores are very high, and frankly, we've felt pretty secure that how we're doing things works for our kids.”
National Assessment of Educational Proficiency tests and the Iowa Test of Basic Skills are two of the measures schools nationwide are using to prove they're meeting No Child Left Behind progress standards.
But another standard is the Highly Qualified Teacher requirement. And that demands that every teacher in middle school or high school prove competency in their core area of teaching. That means they must have a bachelor's degree with a major in that area, such as biology, language arts or math.
The real hang-up, though, comes in social studies. The federal rule considers history, geography, civics/government and economics as separate subjects, requiring a separate major for a teacher to be highly qualified. Many Montana high school teachers meet that requirement. But middle school teachers only need an “elementary endorsement” on their education degrees to teach anything in grades six through eight.
And in the state's hundreds of rural school districts, that specificity is almost impossible to procure. Woodman Elementary School has been serving the Lolo Creek area for 114 years. At its peak, it had about 80 students. At the end of the 2006 school year, it had just 28 kids and a staff of four.
“How can you expect one teacher to have all those endorsements?” Woodman's Crawford asked. “We have 10 kids in grades six through eight. You'd have to hire somebody for language and somebody for science and somebody for math and somebody for social studies.”
Instead, Woodman has Towne teaching grades 6-8, while Michelle Morgan teaches grades 3-5. But they swap off with Towne teaching science to the younger children and Morgan teaching social studies to the older kids.
Towne said even if she had the time to acquire majors in all those core subject areas, there's no way the expense of that college coursework could be covered by her teaching salary. And the reverse is true for school districts.
Teachers are paid according to both their years of experience and academic qualifications. Teachers with multiple endorsements could command prohibitively high salaries. Conversely, isolated school districts would be hard pressed to find squads of single-subject teachers willing to work quarter-time or less.
Missoula Education Association President Dave Severson said between 30 and 40 percent of Missoula County Public Schools teachers probably didn't meet the federal standard. But virtually all of them meet the state licensure requirements - something few other states can claim.
In the region, Montana claimed the highest level of highly qualified teachers, by state standards, in all schools: 99 percent. The next closest was Idaho, with 98.4 percent. However, Idaho joined Montana and Colorado on the list of states that had failed the good-faith effort of meeting federal definitions.
Elsewhere, Wyoming claimed 86 percent of its teachers met the federal standard. North Dakota claimed 89 percent. South Dakota claimed 92.9 percent. Utah claimed 72 percent and Nevada claimed 68 percent. All those states had met the good-faith effort requirement, but still needed more work on their final plans, according to Department of Education records.
In Montana, OPI's proposal was to offer a multiple-standard test to display teacher quality. One part is a teacher's score on the national Praxis II exam of teaching competence. This is the tool a majority of states use as their sole qualification for highly qualified teachers.
“But no research that shows that a teacher who passes the Praxis will produce more successful students,” McCulloch said. “We've been piloting the test in our education schools for the last three years. The first year, the company lost all the test scores for Montana. The second year, they lost half of the scores. That doesn't lead me to feel real certain about that test.”
So Montana added two more components to its qualification measurement. One is the performance assessment a student teacher receives when they complete their classroom training under an experienced teacher. The other is their grade point average from their college career.
“We want multiple measures, not just one paper-and-pencil test,” McCulloch said. “I think we have done very well with coming up with a definition for highly qualified teachers that matches Montana, and more importantly, that ensures the success of our students.”
The June 6 letter from Department of Education official Henry Johnson offered a more opaque opinion. While he acknowledged receiving the OPI proposal, he warned it may not be in place in time to meet the federal July 1 deadline. That could affect the roughly $80 million in federal education grant funds for next school year that are tied to the highly qualified teacher standard.
“If the state fully complies with this requirement, we do not anticipate imposing any additional sanctions or penalties on the Montana OPI regarding this issue,” Johnson wrote.
McCulloch said her staff and federal officials would be parsing the letter over the weekend before announcing whether Montana has cleared the highly qualified teacher hurdle for now. That decision is expected sometime next week.
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com
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