All Talk, No Action: Putting an End to Out-of-Field Teaching, a recently released report by the Education Trust, highlights the troubling numbers regarding the percentage of public school teachers at the middle and high school levels who have little if any college training in the subjects they are assigned to teach. According to the report, an average of 24% of classes in secondary public schools are assigned to teachers who lack either a major or minor in the subject they teach. The percentage leaps to 34% for schools in low-income areas. The report is based on data from the US Department of Education's 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey and concludes that the number of "out-of-field teachers" has increased by 2.5 percent points since the Education Department's 1993-94 survey.

According to Craig D. Jerald, author of the report, two of the major reasons the numbers have not improved are the lack of a "serious system wide effort to solve the problem," and education leaders' and administrators' preference to "keep sweeping it under the rug and using loopholes." For more information concerning this story, users may access the first three news links listed above. For information about the US Department of Education and the Education Trust, users may access the organizations' Web sites provided in links four and five respectively. Finally, the last link leads to the Education Trust's newest report, All Talk, No Action: Putting an End to Out-of-Field Teaching, which offers state-by-state analysis of the most recent federal data on the percentage of core academic secondary school classes taught by teachers without a major or minor in the subject.