Removing artificial barriers to licensure could ease the teacher shortage

When I first became a teacher educator more than a decade ago, I worked with a teacher residency program as an assessor during their selection days. Candidates arrived from all over the country to earn a spot in the program. They completed a rigorous series of activities, including a model lesson in front of students. I still remember an incredible young Black woman who presented her English lesson to a group of high school students. The air shifted when she walked in; the students were engaged, and her lesson was relevant and rigorous. The teacher educator and administrator next to me said, “That was so sophisticated!”

Later I learned that the young woman was not accepted to the program, and the same teacher educator and administrator told me, “She couldn’t pass the Praxis!” I remember her throwing up her hands as though to say, “What can we do?” It was as though the exam was the final measure of her qualifications as a teacher.

Barriers impact candidates of color

Gloria Ladson-Billings, well-known for her work on culturally relevant pedagogy, has also written about culturally relevant approaches to teacher assessment (1998). In 2011, I heard her talk about how exams like the Praxis have become artificial barriers to teaching. They do not actually demonstrate a candidate’s ability to teach, and they prevent strong candidates from entering the profession. Often, these artificial barriers disproportionately affect teacher candidates of color. Indeed, the very concept of standardized testing is deeply rooted in racism and eugenics (Oakes et al., 2018). Lewis Terman, an Ivy League professor who developed and advocated for intelligence tests in the U.S., often used these same tests to support his deficit views about children of color. This set a precedent for the use of IQ tests to “prove” the inferiority of minoritized groups.

In my own state of Virginia, former Gov. Ralph Northam removed the core math Praxis exam as an entry requirement for teacher education programs beginning in 2021, and the enrollment in my program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk increased dramatically. However, the issue of getting candidates licensed during a teacher shortage remains. Artificial barriers such as the content-area Praxis requirements, as well as a standardized literacy assessment, are real and difficult barriers. The latter is especially problematic given that “standard” English is a construct that treats the language patterns of white middle- and upper-class communities as the norm and other language patterns as deviant and incorrect (Baker-Bell, 2020).

Taking these exams also presents a financial burden to teacher candidates. The Praxis subject exam runs $130, and the literacy exam in Virginia costs up to $130 as well ($50 for registration and $40 for each subtest). The edTPA, another assessment used in teacher preparation programs, costs $300. If candidates fail these exams, they must continue to pay for them until they pass — and some of them never pass. My institution has created a scholarship fund to help mitigate these barriers for teacher candidates.

Given the effects of these exams on promising candidates, we have to ask, what are these exams actually measuring? Performance in teacher preparation programs has been shown to be a better indicator of teacher performance than test scores. Jerome V. D’Agostino and Sonja J. Powers (2009) concluded from their research in this area that exams should carry less weight in licensing and grade point averages should be given greater weight. It seems important to consider all the evidence of a candidate’s performance, including their work in teacher preparation programs, rather than letting exams be the final determinant. States also should consider reevaluating the cut scores on their exams to ensure that they are not preventing good candidates from earning licensure.

Policy barriers at many levels

Standardized testing is just one artificial barrier to teaching. As the director of a teacher education program, I often find barriers at every level.

Every local school district has different requirements and standards for candidates on emergency licenses, and some of my candidates decide to teach on emergency licenses while they are completing their programs. This presents challenges for coordinating field experiences required at the state and university level and, sometimes, forces candidates to leave the program even as they continue teaching on an emergency license.

Federal policy around financial aid shifted in summer 2022, and my candidates can no longer use graduate financial aid to pay for the undergraduate courses they must take to get licensed. These courses are not required to graduate from the program but are prerequisites for licensure. Some of my candidates have even been denied for personal loans for these courses. These financial aid complications disproportionately affect our first-generation candidates and teacher candidates of color (Putman et al., 2016) — the very students I serve.

Teacher residency programs have mitigated this issue by funding candidates, and other districts have started to pay candidates as substitute teachers. More avenues for funding are needed to support teacher candidates in completing teacher preparation programs. Indeed, teacher residencies have been successful in diversifying the teacher workforce (Papay et al., 2012) in part because they eliminate financial barriers.

Keeping good teachers out

A principal I work with told me that last year, out of the 22 teachers he hired, only two were licensed. The rest had content-area bachelor’s degrees and were teaching on emergency licenses. Some of these candidates may never be able to earn their licenses because of the artificial barriers in place at every level. Although numerous changes to the teacher workforce are needed to retain teachers, I encourage states and the federal government to rethink the barriers they put in place that prevent many talented candidates who reflect the experiences and identities of public school children from ever entering the teacher workforce — like the candidate in my opening anecdote.

Lots of levers need to be pulled to mitigate the teacher shortages occurring across the U.S., but we should rethink how we measure the abilities of new teachers and the cost of becoming a teacher.

References

Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. NCTE-Routledge.

D’Agostino, J.V. & Powers, S.J. (2009). Predicting teacher performance with test scores and grade point average: A meta-analysis. American Educational Research Journal, 46 (1), 146-182.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Teaching in dangerous times: Culturally relevant approaches to teacher assessment. The Journal of Negro Education, 67 (3), 255-267.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2011). Through a glass darkly: The persistence of race in education research. American Educational Association Brown Lecture.

Oakes, J., Lipton, M., Anderson, L., & Stillman, J. (2018). Teaching to change the world (5th ed.). Routledge.

Papay, J.P., West, M.R., Fullerton, J.B., & Kane, T.J. (2012). Does an urban teacher residency increase student achievement? Early evidence from Boston. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 34 (4), 413-434.

Putman, H., Hansen, M., Walsh, K., & Quintero, D. (2016). High hopes and harsh realities: The real challenge to building a diverse teacher workforce. Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings.

This article appears in the December 2023/January 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 4, p. 66-67.