Rejoinder: Misunderstanding the Problem of Out-of-Field Teaching

The phenomenon of out-of-field teaching - teachers assigned to teach subjects for which they have little education or training-is an important, but long unrecognized, problem in schools. It is an important issue because highly qualified teachers may actually become highly unqualified when they teach subjects for which they have little background. This issue has long been unrecognized, however, largely due to an absence of accurate information about it - a situation remedied with the availability, beginning in the early 1990s, of new data on teachers.