New York City is placing “highly qualified teachers” in its classrooms at a faster rate than the rest of the state, according to a report released by state officials yesterday.

But the city still lags the rest of New York in meeting last year’s deadline under the federal No Child Left Behind Act to have 100% of classes taught by highly qualified teachers. In the city, highly qualified teachers taught 87% of classes compared to 94.5% statewide.

The state education commissioner, Richard Mills, chided the city for its lack of progress in increasing the percentage of highly qualified special education teachers, who teach 81% of classes, but highlighted the city’s overall efforts to improve teacher quality.

“New York City has improved in all subjects and it’s been quite a large improvement,” he said.

The city made significant cuts — to 18.2% in 2006 from 31.4% in 2005 — in the number of reading classes taught by teachers who aren’t highly qualified, but made less progress in science, where the percentage of unqualified teachers was more than 20% last year. National science test scores released last month showed the city lagging far behind the rest of the nation.

A Department of Education spokesman, Andrew Jacob, promised there would be further increases in the percentage of highly qualified teachers this year, with the president of the city teachers union, Randi Weingarten, attributing the increases to raises in teacher pay.

Federal regulations define teachers as highly qualified after they have earned a bachelor’s degree or equivalent, become certified according to state standards, and demonstrated knowledge in the area they teach in, usually by taking a test. All states failed to meet the 2006 deadline under the No Child Left Behind act requiring highly qualified teachers in every classroom. States have until July of this year to meet the requirement, with penalties that could eventually include reductions in federal funding.

A recent study published in an education journal, Education Next, showed that certification was less important in determining student outcomes than experience in the classroom. Other research has shown that teacher qualifications, including educational background and knowledge of the subject area, are directly linked to student achievement, especially in math and science.

The Education Next report showed that poor children around the state are more likely to be taught by an unqualified teacher than are wealthier children, although the gap in elementary schools shrank more than 10 percentage points between 2005 and 2006. In middle and high schools, the gap decreased by only 2.3 percentage points, with high-poverty students taught by unqualified teachers in 17% of classes last year compared to 2% for low-poverty students.

Charter schools followed the opposite pattern to the rest of the state, with the percentage of highly qualified teachers dropping in almost all subject areas between 2005 and 2006. “I think that’s scary: It means those teachers haven’t passed a test on their content knowledge … or it means that those teachers are not certified by the state of New York,” the senior associate for teacher quality at a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, Education Trust, Heather Peske, said.

She noted that that many charter school students in New York come from low-income and minority populations. “Once again low-income kids and minority kids are getting teachers that are not qualified.”

The director of development and policy at the New York State Charter School Association, Peter Murphy, said charter school teachers must meet other qualifications to be hired.

“If you’re not certified, you still have to have other criteria you must meet,” he said. “The best measure to judge charter schools is by student performance.”