Teacher Licensure

A rigorous and reliable state licensure system should enable educators, policymakers, and other stakeholders to obtain a good overview of the extent to which the state’s teachers have adequate qualifications. It should provide reasonable assurance that all fully licensed teachers have the basic knowledge and skill necessary to be successful, and it should distinguish between teachers who meet the minimum standards for licensure and teachers who have proven, and even outstanding, subject knowledge and teaching ability. Beyond that, licensure should provide a clear and valid indication of the extent to which each teacher’s knowledge and background appropriately qualifies him to teach courses in specific disciplines and at specific grade levels and levels of difficulty.

Challenges Facing Licensure

To be sure, states currently employ licensure and certification to serve these objectives, but the effectiveness of licensure practices and policies is inevitably compromised by a number of factors. Some of these are within the control of the states themselves, and some are challenges inherent in the mechanisms that comprise current licensure systems.

Invariably, current state licensure and certification systems employ two main quality control components:

1. Knowledge and course requirements for teachers (which may include a specified course of study) that must be appropriate to the educational needs of K-12 students in the various science and mathematics subjects and at the different grade and difficulty levels – educational needs that are generally defined by the appropriate state content standards
2. Assessments of teachers’ knowledge and skill intended to ensure that teachers do indeed have the minimum competency required.

The fact that licensure and certification are not more precise and reliable tools is a function of several limitations related to these two key components:

• Compromises that states make in their licensure standards – often because of
  

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  18

  See, for example, Arenson, K.W. (1998, July 18). New Standards May Worsen Teacher Shortage. New York Times. For a discussion of the potential adverse impact that raising licensure standards might have on the percentage of minority teachers in the workforce, see Gitomer, D.H., Latham, A.S., & Ziomek, R. (1999). The Academic Quality of Prospective Teachers: The Impact of Admissions and Licensure Testing. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
  concerns¹⁸ about restricting teacher supply and diversity – so that licensure ceases to distinguish reliably between teachers who are at least
  

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  In emulation of the first rule of medicine, it has been suggested by some that initial teacher licensure need do no more than guarantee that duly licensed teachers will “do no harm” to the students in their classrooms. See, for example, Podgursky, M. (2004). Teacher Licensing in U.S. Public Schools: The Case for Simplicity and Flexibility. Peabody Journal of Education, 80 (3), 15-43. It is difficult to understand, however, how that can mean anything significant in the context of education other than teaching students what they are expected to learn; any other outcome is indeed harmful to their prospects for long-term educational success.
  basically capable¹⁹ and those who are not
• Difficulties inherent in the effort to establish standards and assessments of teacher knowledge and competence, including:
  • 

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    See Mitchell, K.J., Robinson, D.Z., Plake, B.S., & Knowles, K.T. (Eds.). (2001). Testing Teacher Candidates: The Role of Licensure Tests in Improving Teaching Quality. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
    Epistemological and methodological complexities ²⁰ involved in the design and scoring of teacher licensure examinations, which compromise their validity
  • Practical challenges, such as figuring out how to stipulate coursework requirements for endorsement in a given subject area
  Determining these requirements is difficult because (a) curricula (and thus course content) differ between teacher preparation programs – even in the same state – and (b) successfully completing a certain number of required courses is not in itself a guarantee that that an individual has mastered the course content
• Significant
  

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  See Darling-Hammond, L., & Ball, D.L. (1998). Teaching for High Standards. What Policymakers Need to Know and Be Able to Do. Philadelphia: Consortium for Policy Research in Education, pp. 11-13.
  state-to-state variability²¹ in the standards for teacher preparation and teacher competence
• The possibility, reflected in
  

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  See Mapping 2005 State Proficiency Standards onto the NAEP Scales. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.
  interstate comparisons²² of states’ student achievement standards, that there are significant differences in basic educational standards and expectations between states with the likely result that teachers in low-standard states are less competent than teachers in high-standard states in spite of having apparently equivalent qualifications on paper.

The Promise of Licensure

Such problems in states’ licensure and certification systems, together with the related consequence that a significant number of teachers who are licensed may have inferior backgrounds while far more capable individuals are discouraged from becoming teachers by flawed licensure rules and regulations, have led

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See, for example, Gordon, R., Kane, T.J., & Staiger, D.O. (2006, April). Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution; and Goldhaber, D. (2007, April). Everyone’s Doing It, but What Does Teacher Testing Tell Us About Teacher Effectiveness? Working Paper. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute.

some experts²³ to call for the abolition of licensure based on background requirements and assessments of knowledge and skill in favor of assessments based strictly on demonstrated classroom effectiveness. And although there are a

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I See Zumwalt, K., & Craig, E. (2005). Teacher’s characteristics: Research on the indicators of quality. In M. Cochran-Smith & K.M. Zeichner (Eds.), Studying Teacher Education (pp. 169-170). Washington, DC & Mahwah, NJ: American Educational Research Association and Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

number of studies²⁴ on the correlation of licensure with teacher quality and effectiveness, the studies disagree markedly about the reliability of licensure as an indicator of teacher quality – in part because licensure practices and policies differ greatly among the individual states. There is

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See, for example, Hawk, P. P., Coble, C.R., & Swanson, M. (1985). Certification: It Does Matter. Journal of Teacher Education, 36(3), 13-15.

evidence,²⁵ however, that students whose teachers are certified in their specific field of instruction learn more than students taking the same subject from teachers who are certified in another field. And there have been a

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For a summary of this research, see National Board Certification—What the Research Says.

number of recent studies²⁶ indicating that students whose teachers have certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards learn marginally more than students whose teachers lack that credential, thus providing at least limited reassurance that a valid, reliable, and fairly rigorous teacher certification system is indeed possible.

Thus, in spite of the challenges, it is our view that assessment- and background-based licensure has a potentially important role to play in helping to ensure the basic competency of a state’s teacher workforce. Moreover, for the development of valid and reliable estimates of a state’s current and future need for science and mathematics teachers, which is the motivating purpose of this project, a licensure system can provide state officials and others with a ready means of assessing whether their teacher workforce has the basic qualifications necessary to meet the educational needs of the state in science and mathematics. Licensure systems will serve that role effectively, however, and overcome many of the failings to which critics justifiably point only to the extent that states commit to making licensure as valid and rigorous as possible and maintaining its integrity.

The reluctance of some states to commit to a rigorous licensure system that

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See Gitomer, D.H., Latham, A.S., & Ziomek, R. (1999). The Academic Quality of Prospective Teachers: The Impact of Admissions and Licensure Testing. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.

may reduce²⁷ (at least initially) the teacher pool or the percentage of minority teachers is understandable, and it is not our intention here to advocate that states should strengthen their licensure system at any cost. The cost of not having a strong and effective licensure system, however, is also large; it deprives states of a powerful tool for ensuring the quality of their teachers and thus increases the risk that students will be taught by teachers whose qualifications are inadequate. To expect a licensure system to be absolutely foolproof is to expect too much in view of the inherent difficulties that attend it. To expect a licensure system to be an effective tool for identifying the basic competency of a state’s teacher workforce, however, and especially the adequacy of teachers’ subject knowledge in their fields of instruction, is eminently reasonable if states are willing to be demanding in the system’s development and uncompromising in its application.

Ultimately, of course, the strength and integrity of a state’s teacher licensure and certification system are a function of the strength and integrity of a number of interrelated sets of standards: for grading students, for high school graduation, for entry into and graduation from post-secondary institutions – including graduation from teacher preparation programs. Although our focus here is specifically on standards for licensure, we urge states to do all they can to ensure that their standards are strong across the board. Otherwise, no matter how extensive or demanding the specific requirements for teacher licensure and certification may appear to be in the written rules and regulations, their ultimate effectiveness in promoting teacher competence will be compromised.