More than half the nation’s middle school students and a quarter of its high school students are learning core academic subjects from teachers who lack certification in those subjects and did not major in them in college, a new federal survey shows.
   A report drawn from data in the Schools and Staffing Survey outlines the phenomenon of out-of-field teaching, in which educators are assigned to teach classes for which they are not formally trained.
   Researchers had eagerly awaited the SASS data – released by the U.S. Department of Education on May 31 – since the survey is conducted only every six years and represents the most extensive set of data on the country’s education workforce.