A new report finds the number of teachers lacking credentials in California classrooms is down sharply. The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning says 42,000 teachers lacked the proper credentials in the first school year of the decade.
The Center's Harvey Hunt says that number was down to about 15,000 last year. He says California's class size reduction laws created the need for lots of new teachers seven years ago.
Hunt : Which led to the employment of large numbers of under-qualified teachers, teachers that had not completed their teaching credential. But in the last five years we were able to report that the number of these unqualified teachers has gone down dramatically.
Hunt says the shrinking credential gap is good news, but the report says there is still a reason to be concerned. He says credentials are not an accurate measurement of teacher quality. Hunt says there's currently no system in place to measure whether teachers with credentials are doing a good job.
