Almost eight years after the No Child Left Behind Act was adopted, the billions of dollars invested in the federal education accountability law haven’t improved the quality of teaching in U.S. classrooms, a former Bush administration official said last week. It’s the same realization that Fort Wayne Community Schools officials have arrived at in developing the professional development piece of their ambitious high school reinvention effort.

For students, the new teaching initiative should mean classes that move beyond memorizing content to applying what they learn in projects and in real-world situations. It could mean an English class will be intertwined with a U.S. history class, or a science course combined with geography.

For teachers, the initiative means learning to create lesson plans that take content to higher levels – challenging students with an assignment that requires them to tackle a project or to use technology in problem-solving. It means opening the classroom door to work with a teacher in another department and allowing an instructional coach to offer ideas to reach every student.

It’s a higher level of instructional improvement than the federal accountability law prescribed.

“Finally, we can say that all states now have a highly qualified teacher definition that is compliant with No Child Left Behind,” Susan Neuman, now professor in education studies at the University of Michigan told a Teachers College forum at Columbia University last week.

“No one is excited,” Neuman said. “I don’t see parents coming home and saying, ‘Guess what? I have a teacher who meets the definition of a highly qualified teacher that is compliant with No Child Left Behind.’ We’re not jumping up and down. Why? Because we’ve seen no change in the quality of teaching. In fact, I could argue that, at least anecdotally, the quality of education or the quality of teachers isn’t any better than it was before spending all these billions of dollars.”

That’s because the teacher quality standards of No Child Left Behind simply set minimum requirements: All teachers must have a bachelor’s degree, certification and knowledge of the subjects they teach. None of those alone ensures the teacher can engage students.

Superintendent Wendy Robinson said the professional development initiative is key to the district’s success. Reducing class sizes, the focus for some suburban districts, isn’t a viable goal for FWCS because the district doesn’t have the taxpayer support to continually hire more teachers. More important, Robinson said, is the fact that ineffective teachers need to improve, whether they have 28 students or 21 students. And the best way to help them improve is to have effective teachers work alongside them in the classroom, helping them find methods that bring out the best in their students.

Resistance to the change is inevitable. A recent letter to the editor complained that the district’s plan to hire interventionists and instructional coaches would funnel money away from the classroom and that the talents of the best teachers are put to best use when they are working directly with students, not with struggling teachers.

Most teachers, however, understand that the weakest link in a school is its weakest teacher. And if anyone understands that learning doesn’t end with a teaching degree, it should be a teacher.