Lawsuit would imperil Teach For America

Here's Education Gadfly Mike Petrilli's take on the possible implications of this lawsuit (article below):

Highly questionable reasoning

True or false: NCLB considers teachers trained through alternate routes to certification (like those employed by Teach For America) to be “highly qualified”? A new lawsuit <http://publicadvocates.org/docs/FTQ/FTQPressRelease082107FIN.pdf> filed by “a coalition of parents, students, community groups, and legal advocates” (with some encouragement, we’re sure, from the education school establishment) says the answer is obviously “false.” It charges that a five-year-old federal regulation about the matter creates for alternative certification a loophole that “defies the will of Congress” and “harms children.” The Administration, though, argues that, under certain conditions, alternatively prepared teachers can indeed meet the “highly qualified” designation. Why the confusion? The law <http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg107.html#sec9101> itself is ambiguous on the point, at once allowing for alternate routes, while simultaneously banning any waivers of certification on an “emergency, temporary, or provisional basis.” The problem is that alternate routes, by their very nature, don’t confer certification on teachers until they complete a one or two year program—meaning they have to “waive” certification on a provisional basis. So what did Congress intend? Who knows, which is why the executive branch has regulatory authority to clarify such matters. This is far from an arcane issue, of course; if the Department were to lose this lawsuit, say goodbye to TFA, whose 5,000 corps members would be banned from teaching in the very high-need Title I schools they are trained to serve. True or false: This lawsuit is really about preserving the education schools’ monopoly.

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U.S. sued over teacher credentials
A coalition of parents and advocates say federal rules are violating education law.
By Joel Rubin August 22, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-teachers22aug22,1,7237922.story

A coalition of California schools advocates and parents sued the federal government's Department of Education on Tuesday, claiming it is violating the teacher quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind education law.