Topeka ? The No Child Left Behind Act may leave some teachers behind.

One in five Kansas teachers failed to clear the “highly qualified” mark set by the federal education law, according to recently released statistics.

But rather than causing panic, education officials said that as in other rankings related to No Child Left Behind, things are not always as they initially appear.

“This is kind of a good example of the federal government coming in to manage the inputs rather than paying attention to the outputs,” said Mark Tallman, a spokesman for the Kansas Association of School Boards.

Highly qualified

Under the No Child Left Behind legislation, every teacher of a core subject must be “highly qualified” by the end of the 2005-2006 school year. That means teachers must have a bachelor’s degree, be fully certified by the state, and have expertise in the subject taught. Core subjects are English, reading, math, science, foreign languages, social studies, history and the arts.

In the first round of states reporting on this measure to the U.S. Department of Education, Kansas said 80 percent of its 33,000 teachers met the requirements to be designated as highly qualified. Only eight states reported a lower percentage.

But many education experts said these initial numbers from the states were rough estimates at best and suspect at worst. Eleven states didn’t even provide statistics, and the variance of those that did ranged from 16 percent in Alaska to 99 percent in Wisconsin. The federal Education Department released the figures only after Freedom of Information Act requests were made by education groups and the media.

And many states still are drawing up criteria on how they will determine whether a teacher has the required course knowledge to gain the highly qualified status under the law.

Unnecessary slap

But the highly qualified designation has caused heartburn in many areas of the country from educators who said it was an unnecessary slap at teachers and failed to identify which teachers were the good ones. Also, the federal government has been criticized for failing to come up with the necessary funding to fulfill the requirements of No Child Left Behind.

“We’re not sure that the only thing that defines a highly qualified teacher should be measured by their coursework,” Tallman said. “We simply believe there are a lot of teachers who have learned to do the job effectively without necessarily meeting all the standards required by the new law.”

He added that rural areas may have the toughest job complying with the law because many times teachers in underpopulated areas have to teach many subjects.

Rene Islas, a special assistant to the federal education secretary, defended the requirements and said the federal government would work closely with states to help them meet the standards.

“We’ve seen report after report linking subject-matter competency to the quality of teaching,” he said.

Islas conceded “there are great teachers out there who don’t necessarily have all the check marks.” But he added, “Teachers who are effective do meet these requirements or can meet them very easily.”

He agreed that rural schools may have the toughest time complying, but said the administration was willing to find innovative ways for classes in those areas to be taught by highly qualified teachers. An example, he said, could be long-distance learning, where students are taught by an instructor through a video-conference or online class.

Kansas teachers

Kansas’ total of 80 percent of teachers being highly qualified was based on a “conservative estimate,” according to Martha Gage, the state’s director of teacher education and licensing.

Kansas reported that 20 percent didn’t meet the requirement because under state law many teachers are licensed to teach kindergarten through the ninth-grade. So some teachers with degrees to teach in elementary school may be teaching a core class in junior high. That situation would not meet the highly qualified standard, unless the teacher had some additional training in the core subject.

Also, some teachers were not included in the highly qualified ranking because they started teaching before 1982, which is when the State Board of Education started approving all teacher education and preparation programs.

The Kansas Department of Education has developed a system to start checking on whether teachers within those two groups would fit the highly qualified designation, Gage said.

“The state does have a plan. If the teachers can show they have lots and lots of work on their content area, they will be counted as highly qualified,” Gage said. “I think we’re going to be OK.”

A team of assistants from the U.S. Department of Education visited state education officials several weeks ago and was satisfied with the progress Kansas was making in identifying teachers who are not highly qualified and raising them up to that level, Gage said. She said Kansas’ system also was being copied by other states.

Mary Rodriguez, executive director of human resources for the Lawrence school district, said the district still was awaiting information from the state Education Department on how many teachers in Lawrence did not meet the highly qualified standard.

Rodriguez said she didn’t think it would be many because more than 95 percent of the teachers met the state’s “fully qualified” standard, although that standard is lower than the federal requirements.

“It’s an absolute that we do everything that we can to have the best teachers for our kids, so the philosophy behind the highly qualified requirement is commendable,” Rodriguez said. “If we could have some funding to support that, in terms of teacher salaries, that would help.”