Race, Gender, and Teacher Testing: How Objective a Tool is Teacher Licensure Testing?

April 2008
Dan Goldhaber, Michael Hansen

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CRPE Working Paper #2008-2

This paper analyzes how teacher licensure tests function in providing information about the effectiveness of teachers.

Virtually all states require teacher candidates to undergo licensure testing as a prerequisite to participation in the public school teacher labor market. This paper analyzes how these tests function in providing information about the effectiveness of teachers. In our analysis using a dataset of public school teachers and their students in North Carolina spanning ten years, we find both black teachers and male teachers have substantively lower performance on these licensure tests but have few differences in classroom performance. Further, we find performance on the tests does not uniformly predict classroom effectiveness for all teacher demographics. Additionally, we analyze the interactions between teacher and student race and gender, holding licensure test performance constant. This analysis suggests that black students, in particular, benefit from having a black teacher. These positive mentoring effects are benefits that may be lost if the state were to pursue policies that strictly enforce licensure cutoffs.