PRESS RELEASE:

Raising the hurdle to becoming a teacher may keep good teachers out of the classroom

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04/06/2006

New research shows that increasing the cut score on teacher licensure tests – a common recommendation for improving teacher quality - is a double edged sword: raising the bar would eliminate some of the worst candidates, but at the cost of excluding some of the most effective ones.

The overwhelming majority of states - 48 of 50 - require potential teachers to pass tests before they can work in a public school. Some states, including Texas, are moving towards using these tests as their primary requirement for a teaching credential.

The new study, Everyone’s Doing It, But What Does Teacher Testing Tell Us About Teacher Effectiveness, finds that teacher licensure tests provide a weak signal of how effective teachers will be once they are in the classroom, reinforcing the idea that there is no silver bullet when it comes to gauging the quality of would-be teachers.

“Because these tests aren’t well linked to classroom effectiveness, and states use a cut off score to grant licenses, my findings show that teacher testing policies necessarily exclude teachers who would have been effective instructors but don’t perform well on licensure tests,” says author Dan Goldhaber, a research associate professor at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs and an affiliated scholar of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and the Urban Institute.

“On the other hand, licensure tests can be useful for screening out the worst candidates. This is the tradeoff states face when using high-stakes tests: do they eliminate some of the least effective teachers at the cost of eliminating some of the most effective?”

To examine the link between licensure tests and teacher quality, Goldhaber matched the test scores for over 700,000 North Carolina students with their teachers over 10 years. He will present the results tomorrow, April 7th, at the American Education Research Association annual meeting in San Francisco.

“Ideally, states would still require candidates to take these tests, but school districts would weigh their scores against other attributes as part of their hiring process,” said Goldhaber. “Predicting teacher quality before teachers get into the classroom is very complicated. There’s a limit to what can be done at the state level.”

As the author notes, “this is a stepping off point in examining state licensure policies; for instance, we really don’t know whether these tests or other hurdles associated with licensure dissuade talented people from pursuing teaching as a profession.”

The study is available online from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at www.crpe.org.