Maintaining high teacher licensure standards helps ensure that teachers have the knowledge and skills they need to teach students from their first day in the classroom.
How Teacher Licensure Safeguards Student Learning
Teaching is hard—it requires deep content knowledge and pedagogical skills. Students struggle to learn when their teacher hasn’t been effectively prepared to teach them. This disproportionately affects students of color and students from low-income backgrounds, who are most often assigned less experienced or less prepared teachers.
States that maintain rigorous teacher licensure standards are doing their part to safeguard student learning. These states require aspiring teachers to complete a teacher preparation program and ensure that those programs provide them with the training they need.
High-quality teacher licensure tests serve as one crucial guardrail for the profession to help ensure all students have access to well-prepared teachers. These assessments help gauge whether aspiring teachers have the proper foundational knowledge to effectively teach their subjects and support student learning. Additionally, how aspiring teachers perform on their licensure tests offers a window into the quality of preparation they receive.
Latest Findings
False Assurances: Many states' licensure tests don't signal whether elementary teachers understand reading instruction
Every year, nearly 100,000 elementary teachers nationwide enter classrooms with false assurances that they’re ready to teach reading. That’s because most states use a weak licensure test that fails to accurately signal whether teachers understand reading instruction. Explore the quality of reading licensure tests and examine which states use strong tests.
More than half (56%) of the reading licensure tests NCTQ examined don't adequately assess the core components of scientifically based reading instruction.
Digging Deeper: Which types of institutions achieve excellence and equity for aspiring teachers of color?
This analysis examines teacher licensure test data through excellence and racial equity lenses, spotlighting institutions achieving high pass rates for all test takers, including aspiring teachers of color.
Driven by Data: Using licensure tests to build a strong, diverse teacher workforce
Long-hidden data on institutional pass rates for elementary content teacher licensure tests serves as a compass, pointing toward strengths and opportunities in preparing aspiring elementary teachers for success in the classroom.
We examine state policy trends that govern some of the most essential aspects of teacher preparation, from reading and content knowledge licensure exams to admissions and basic skills test requirements.
