Although the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act requires that classroom teachers be highly qualified, the assumption that achieving the highly qualified endorsement equates to teacher effectiveness in the classroom is unverified. The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of teacher qualification, as defined by the NCLB Act and…

Richard Murnane observes that the American ideal of equality of educational opportunity has for years been more the rhetoric than the reality of the nation's political life. Children living in poverty, he notes, tend to be concentrated in low-performing schools staffed by ill-equipped teachers. They are likely to leave school without the skills…