Potential Impacts of Policy on Teacher Preparation and Certification

Gay Stewart, West Virginia University

One area where the intersection of government policy, science, and education come into play is teacher preparation and certification. Because teachers have an enormous impact on the economic future of their students, evidence-based policy on teacher certification is essential. However, research on the effectiveness of teachers is sometimes contradictory or lacking.

In many states, especially for particular disciplines (mathematics, chemistry, physics, and special education for instance), there are significant teacher shortages. While influenced by national organizations, the certification of teachers, the process by which someone becomes officially licensed to teach in a public school classroom, is controlled individually by each state. Contrast this to the process of being licensed as a doctor or a certified public accountant, both of which require national standards to be met. Examples of areas open to state control include the fields in which to allow certification (i.e., physics, physical science, or general science), the minimum scores on standardized tests to add additional certifications (i.e., a teacher holding a life science certification wishes to add physics), and the accreditation requirements of preparation programs.

One national organization involved in program accreditation is the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP). CAEP’s mission is to advance “equity and excellence in educator preparation through evidence-based accreditation that assures quality and supports continuous improvement to strengthen P-12 student learning.” CAEP has a prominent role in the teacher preparation accreditation processes in over 30 states. While it may seem clear that accrediting agencies should collect and report data on teacher placement and effectiveness, previous requirements for oversight and reporting mostly ignored the impact of program graduates on their students, giving little attention to where they taught, how long they remained in the profession, or the quality of their teaching. Instead of focusing on collecting student outcome data, which could provide evidence to help improve preparation programs, the emphasis has been on changing policies on admissions and certification requirements. These requirements are based on a body of evidence that may not be well supported in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, as many teacher effectiveness studies have focused on elementary school.

According to the National Academy of Sciences Report Preparing Teachers: Building Evidence for Sound Policy,¹ “The primary need is to build a body of evidence, developed from multiple perspectives and using an array of research designs, that establishes links between teacher preparation and learning — both teachers’ learning and K-12 students’ learning.” Because the evidence available concerning teacher preparation and its links to student learning is so limited, “high-stakes policy debates about the most effective ways to recruit, train, and retain a high-quality teacher workforce remain muddled.”1 In fact, the US Department of Education decided that because “effectiveness of graduates is not associated with any particular type of preparation program … the only way to determine which programs are producing more effective teachers is to link information on the performance of teachers in the classroom back to their teacher preparation programs.”²

The move to “raise the bar” for educator preparation programs by applying stricter admissions standards on university-based programs has restricted the potential number of candidates. As states try to fill the gaps in their teacher workforce, universities are becoming less dominant in teacher preparation and alternative licensure and for-profit alternative pathways are on the rise. Further, decisions on appropriate licensure routes are being made without sufficient evidence to inform policy. In fact, in some cases alternative programs are not held to the same admissions standards as university programs, so they cannot be based on the same evidence. One example is grade point average (GPA). In West Virginia, for a program to be CAEP accredited, each candidate must have a minimum GPA of 2.75, but the cohort must have an average GPA of 3.0, so a student with a 2.9 GPA who has truly demonstrated himself to have potential as a teacher may be dismissed from the program if there are not enough higher grades to balance his. Yet, the minimum requirements to enter the Alternative Certification program are a bachelor's degree with an overall 2.5 GPA from a regionally accredited institution of higher education.

While one’s first instinct is that it might be appropriate to hold future teachers to a high GPA standard, such rules have no flexibility or insight into the causes of a poor GPA. In fact, despite the national need for greater equity, the higher GPA requirement greatly disadvantages college students who come from a lower socioeconomic background. For instance, a student who significantly struggles with grades in the first year or two of college but then turns around and demonstrates a good understanding of her major may not meet the GPA requirements for entering the cohort. While there is some evidence showing that a higher GPA may lead to better elementary school teachers, there is lack of evidence that a higher GPA makes someone a better physics teacher. This highlights another point that must enter the policy discussion. Because there are many more elementary teachers produced than high school teachers of any discipline, there is more research on the elementary teacher population. It is not clear, however, if that research holds for high school science teachers; such evidence may not be appropriate for making policy decisions.

Although the research is unclear as to how much or what properties it must have, there is some evidence that pedagogical preparation does improve educator effectiveness. The alternative or emergency licensure programs that must be put in place to ensure there is a teacher of some sort in every classroom do not necessarily offer an equivalent pedagogical preparation. By raising the entrance requirements on university-based programs, as well as increasing the cost to those programs and its students through additional requirements on what must happen in those programs, more potential teachers are forced into routes that offer potentially less effective preparation and may result in their leaving the teaching field more quickly. An analysis of four waves of data from the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey (1999-2012) discovered that allowing for already high turnover rates in at-risk schools, alternatively certified teachers have an attrition rate that is almost 8 percentage points higher than that of graduates of a standard university-based teaching curriculum — 25 percent vs. 17 percent.³ It would seem these interrelated policy issues should be discussed more holistically.

Gay Stewart is Professor of Physics and director of the Center for Excellence in STEM Education at WVU since 2014. At the University of Arkansas from 1994-2014, she focused on three interrelated issues: improving introductory courses, improving physics majors’ preparation for many careers options, and preparing future faculty, both high school and professoriate. UA saw a 10-fold increase in physics graduates and was one of the six initial Physics Teacher Education Coalition institutions.

(Endnotes)

¹ National Research Council (2010). Preparing teachers: Building evidence for sound policy. Washington, DC: Committee on the Study of Teacher Preparation Programs in the United States, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Academies Press, pp. 5-6

² US Department of Education. (2016a). Teacher preparation issues: Final regulations. pp. 566. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/documents/teaching/teacher-prep-final-regs.pdf

³ Christopher Redding, Thomas M. Smith. (2016) Easy in, Easy out: Are Alternatively Certified Teachers Turning Over at Increased Rates? American Educational Research Journal Vol 53, Issue 4, pp. 1086 - 1125

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.