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Other Matters: CES Does Not Effectively Monitor Its Educators’ Out-of-Field Teaching.

The audit recommends that CES develop an information system that would allow it to track which classes its educators teach and quantify the extent to which they teach out of field.

Table of Contents

Overview

CES does not effectively monitor the extent to which its educators teach subjects for which they were not hired or do not have the appropriate license. (Teaching in a field for which one is not licensed is referred to as out-of-field teaching.) Out-of-field teaching is not uncommon and is sometimes necessary if there is a staffing shortage.

DESE has issued guidance governing out-of-field teaching for instances when it is unavoidable. DESE requires that educators spend no more than 20% of their time teaching out of field in a school district (e.g., in public, charter, technical, or vocational schools). However, educators who are not employed in a school district, such as those who teach at DYS facilities, are not subject to this requirement. Most of CES’s students are served under contracts with state agencies, such as DYS, and are exempt from this requirement; however, the quality of education that students receive can be negatively affected if too much of their instruction is out-of-field teaching.

In its Employee Handbook, CES recognizes the importance of ensuring that all its students receive their instruction from only licensed educators:

All teachers employed by CES are subject to the same professional standards, approval criteria, and licensure/re-licensure requirements as teachers employed by a local school system. All CES teachers must be highly qualified in the subjects they are teaching.

CES uses several management systems to hire educators, evaluate them, place them in classrooms, and monitor their attendance. However, CES does not have a central system it can use to determine the percentage of time its educators teach subjects for which they were not hired and/or are not appropriately licensed (or “highly qualified” according to the Employee Handbook). Because CES requires each educator to have a license and has contracts with educators to teach certain subjects, we expected that educators would primarily be assigned to teach subjects for which they were licensed. Since CES does not have a central system, CES could only provide us with a report from the Education Personnel Information Management System (EPIMS) to show evidence of teaching assignments during the audit period, and we used this report to perform audit testing that was related to our objective regarding whether CES educators’ and teachers’ credentials corresponded to their contracts or positions. However, as discussed in Finding 1, CES did not always accurately report data in EPIMS, and EPIMS is not a system CES can use to track teaching assignments during the school year.

During our audit, we conducted an online survey of 159 CES educators from our audit period and received responses from 124. One of the survey’s goals was to obtain an understanding of the extent to which educators taught subjects for which they had not been hired and/or taught out of field. Forty-three of 124 respondents indicated that they spent 30% or more of their average workweeks teaching subjects for which they did not have the appropriate licenses. Additionally, 71 respondents stated that they had been asked to teach a subject for which they did not have a license at least five times while they were employed at CES.

Based on these results, we recommend that CES develop an information system that would allow it to track which classes its educators teach and quantify the extent to which they teach out of field. CES should use this information to ensure compliance with its Employee Handbook, which requires all of its students to receive as much classroom instruction as possible from educators who are “highly qualified in the subjects they are teaching.”

Auditee’s Response

As acknowledged by the Auditor, CES educators working in institutional settings are not subject to the requirements restricting the time an educator may teach “out-of-field.” Therefore, monitoring an [educator’s] out-of-field teaching in these settings is not required.

For all other CES programs, CES will review its current monitoring of “out-of-field” teaching internal controls and make any required changes and improvements, including those that may be needed to the employee handbook.

Auditor’s Reply

We acknowledge that according to DESE regulations, CES educators working in institutional settings belonging to DYS are not subject to DESE’s limitations on out-of-field teaching. However, as mentioned throughout this report, DESE recognizes that to better ensure that students receive quality educational services, the percentage of time teachers can teach out of field must be limited, monitored, and managed. Therefore, we believe that CES should develop an information system that would allow it to track which classes its educators teach and quantify the extent to which they teach out of field. CES can use this information to ensure compliance with its Employee Handbook, which requires all of its students to receive as much classroom instruction as possible from educators who are “highly qualified in the subjects they are teaching.”

Date published: July 22, 2021

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