Will Revised Teacher Quality Plans Be Any Good?

As this article about Oregon's revised teacher quality plan shows, states seem like they're moving pretty slowly when it comes to the hard work of addressing how qualified and experienced teachers end up clustered in some schools and not in others.

The Oregon plan follows something referred to ominously at the Council of Chief State School Officers "template" -- that can't be good -- and proposes a very moderate-sounding set of actions. Of course, the state claims that it's at 91 percent HQT over all, and only two percentage points lower for high poverty schoools.

But I wonder if that statewide gap widens out if you look within districts -- as NCLB requires -- and I wonder whether states might be moving a little faster on this NCLB stepchild of an issue if they hadn't been given an extra year and no real threat of being fined by the USDE.