Dealing with a child who brings home a bad report card is one thing, but what happens when parents get a letter from school saying their child's teacher is unqualified?

	Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette South Fayette Middle School teachers Scott Philipp, left, and Matt Popovic look over their coursework during a Secondary Literacy Training course at the Allegheny Intermediate Unit in Homestead, Pa. Click image for larger version.

So far, there have been few consequences for the estimated 5 percent of teachers in Pennsylvania who are striving to achieve "highly qualified teacher" status under the federal No Child Left Behind Act but have not yet made the grade.

"I know schools have been sending those letters out. But the reaction has been very little," said Nina Esposito-Visgitis, a staff representative for the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers.

But stress levels have gone up for teachers in many public schools.

"People are worried about this," said Maria Lardas, a special-education teacher at Brashear High School. "Our union says they will help us in any way to understand and decipher it, but people are nervous and have fear this might go the wrong way."

The federal law requires all teachers to be state certified, hold a bachelor's degree and demonstrate competency in each core academic subject area taught.

The core academic subjects covered by the law are English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history and geography.

These requirements have the biggest effect on some special-education and middle-school teachers.

Special-education teachers are often needed to teach a variety of classes and used to be able to do so with a special-education certification. The NCLB law is requiring special-education teachers to become highly qualified in each of the academic courses they teach.

Some middle-school teachers have elementary certificates, which previously enabled them to teach through eighth grade. The state now has a separate middle-school certificate and limits the elementary one to kindergarten through sixth grade. That means those teaching core academic subjects in seventh and eighth grades must demonstrate their competency in them if they don't hold a secondary certificate in the subject.

While the highly qualified teacher component of the federal law has added another layer of requirements, the question is, does it make them better?

The federal mandate recognizes that teacher quality has a major impact on student achievement, but the law doesn't consider essential qualities in a teacher, such as creativity or their ability to establish a good rapport with students.

"We believe the focus of the highly qualified provision is overly focused on content knowledge while ignoring essential elements of quality teaching like pedagogical skills and differentiating instruction," said Scott Emerick, a policy associate at the Center for Teaching Quality in Hillsborough, N.C.

"What the law looks at is do you have the content and can you prove it? But we believe that's a very narrow focus for what quality teaching means," Mr. Emerick said.

Some veteran teachers are working hard to meet the new requirements.

A total of 1,876 teachers took classes offered by the Allegheny Intermediate Unit last year to meet the highly qualified status. The classes covered the range of core academic subjects as well the art of instruction, said Sarah Zablotsky, AIU spokeswoman.

The AIU has a pool of 60 instructors who teach online and traditional classes.

Ronniece Sirmons, a sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade math teacher at Manchester Elementary School who is working toward her highly qualified teacher status, thinks too much of the onus for improved student achievement is being placed on teachers.

"Personally, I think it's a lot more work for us and we are held more accountable," said Ms. Sirmons, who is elementary certified. "Parents and students are not being held more accountable. So it's more pressure on teachers."

Some teachers have been able to meet the core academic area requirements by passing a state-required standardized test called the Praxis. Some who haven't passed the test, or prefer another route, are going back to school for more training.

Not all teachers need to take the Praxis. Those with secondary certificates in content areas such as math, English or science are grandfathered in.

However, elementary-certified teachers teaching middle grades or special-education teachers teaching a content area must take the exam or attend classes to meet the highly qualified teacher requirements.

One of the reasons most Pennsylvania teachers already are considered highly qualified is because the current certification process previously covered many of the federal standards.

In addition to federal requirements, the state requires certified teachers to complete 180 hours or six credits in their content areas every five years, or their teaching certificates become inactive.

"The new laws make it very difficult for me to do what I'm good at and have proven results in," said Ms. Lardas, whose master's degree teaching certificate is specifically geared to special education.

"I always had a desire to help kids learn and succeed," she said. "There's nothing more rewarding than watching a special-needs kid learn a new skill and become a contributing member of society."

A seven-year veteran, she currently teaches social studies for special education and a class that guides senior research graduation projects at Brashear. A state program known as Bridge will allow her to meet the highly qualified teacher status in social studies. Her deadline is June 2008.

Ms. Lardas has not taken the Praxis, nor does she intend to, opting instead to earn credits through the training her school district offers in her content area.

She's also in the Bridge program for science, although she's no longer teaching science because the school has a greater need for social studies right now.

Under the federal law, states were supposed to have highly qualified teachers in every core academic class by the end of last school year. No states made it, but most states, including Pennsylvania, got credit for showing serious effort.

Federal officials required all states to submit new plans for reaching the goal and set a new goal of 100 percent compliance by the end of this school year.

Some states still may be years away.

Across the country, teachers are under enormous pressure to achieve highly qualified status because their jobs may eventually depend on it.

In May, a foreign language teacher at Pasco High School in Florida tried to overdose on pills prescribed for depression and anxiety. She told authorities she feared losing her job because she had failed a Spanish exam that would have helped her become a highly qualified teacher.

Ms. Esposito-Visgitis said no city union members had lost their jobs and no teachers were in jeopardy at this time.

"We don't have glaring numbers of unqualified teachers," she said. "It's been very smooth in our district, I'll say."

West Jefferson Hills School District took a proactive approach to getting all its teachers highly qualified when the NCLB teacher requirements came out around 2001, said Terry Kinavey, assistant to the superintendent.

At the middle school, where some elementary teachers teach seventh and eighth grades, the district required them to either take the Praxis or go back to school so they would be highly qualified before the initial NCLB deadline of December 2006.

As a result, all teachers in the district are highly qualified.

"What makes me upset is they were always qualified to teach seventh and eighth grades," Mrs. Kinavey said. "It's so hard to explain this to parents. How do you tell them their child's teacher is not qualified?

"But I understand what the state is doing. The state is adding rigor and relevance so that teachers have a stronger background in those content areas. The state is targeting a goal to ensure all students have highly qualified teachers."