Education's Weak Link

SREB report exposes the wide-spread lack of proper training and certification for teachers at the middle-school level in the South

By Karin Chenoweth

When students leave the middle grades with low academic achievement, they are often guided into less challenging classes by their high schools and are consequently less prepared for college work. This is a common phenomenon — and one with particular resonance for African Americans and Latinos, who are often sorted out of honors and advanced math and science classes.
A new report from the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) provides some clues as to why so many students leave the middle grades with low academic performance. Among the most prevalent problems is the fact that teachers are often unprepared to teach the subjects they are assigned. One of the most startling findings was that many middle school English teachers did not major in English or language arts. Instead, they majored in either elementary education or home economics.
"We were shocked," says Sondra S. Cooney, the author of the report. "We expected the math and science data to look like it does. We had just assumed the language arts would be okay."
Cooney is quick to add that she is not saying that those home economics teachers "are not well-educated people, but they have probably not taken writing classes and the literature classes that give them strategies to teach English to middle-school students."
According to the report, 36 percent of eighth-grade English teachers in one southern state are certified in elementary education. An additional 42 percent are certified in subjects other than elementary or secondary education — but did not major in English. Most of that 42 percent are home economics majors.
In eighth-grade science, the teachers without a major in science are mostly health and physical education majors, according to the report.
The state from which this data were gathered is not identified, Cooney says, because she believes that it should not be punished for the fact that it gathers the data. She expects that most of the other states would have similar data if they were to collect it.
"One of our questions is why all the states are not collecting this data," she says.
The SREB, which consists of the governors and their appointees of eleven states in the South, has been gathering data on schools since 1948, when it was formed to try to bring education in the South up to the standards of the rest of the country. The board's latest report, Improving Teaching in the Middle Grades: Higher Standards for Students Aren't Enough, is the third in a series of reports on middle grades, which it calls "education's weak link."
One of the report's major recommendations is that states require teachers of students in the middle grades — roughly sixth through eighth grade, though some places include fifth and ninth grades in the middle years — to have a specific license designed for the middle schools. Such a requirement would spur changes in schools of education and offer special classes geared specifically to the middle grades, says Dr. Lynn Cagle, associate dean for teacher education at University of Tennessee-Knoxville.