A state report filed with the U.S. Department of Education shows little difference in the quality of teachers assigned to high-poverty and low-poverty public school classrooms in Hawai'i.

The figures, for the school year 2004-05, are included in a study, Teaching Inequality, released yesterday by the Education Trust. The study examined three states — Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin — and concluded that poor and minority students are shortchanged on the quality of teachers.

The study found that poor and minority students were far more likely to have teachers who are inexperienced, unqualified or teaching out of their field.

According to Hawai'i figures included with the study, 36 percent of classes in core academic subjects in high-poverty schools are taught by teachers who are not highly qualified.

That compares to 32 percent of classes in core academic subjects in low-poverty schools taught by teachers who aren't highly qualified.

"If anything, we focus on a lot of attention to bring their service up," said Gerald Okamoto, director of the Office of Human Resources for the Department of Education.

He said the DOE cannot mandate to which school a teacher must go, but the department offers incentives for teachers who go to "hard-to-place, hard-to-staff locations, which are customarily the lowest-performing schools."

"We'll pay a certain stipend for relocation or retention if they go there and stay for a period of time," he said.

Okamoto said that program has been in existence for three or four years and will continue.

The bottom line of the Education Trust study is simple: Poorly qualified teachers drag down student achievement.

"We now know that all kinds of kids, poor, rich, minority, white are affected by their teacher's ability," Kati Haycock, who heads Education Trust, told the Chicago Tribune. "The research shows that kids who have two, three, four strong teachers in a row will eventually excel, no matter what their background, while kids who have even two weak teachers in a row will never recover."

The Tribune reported these highlights from the study: