RALEIGH – As Gov. Mike Easley and the North Carolina General Assembly attempted to resolve a serious dispute about teacher certification, the John Locke Foundation published a report Friday concluding that the state’s current certification process does little to ensure the state has high-quality teachers.
Easley vetoed a bill designed to make it easier for out-of-state teachers to enter North Carolina classrooms, arguing that it would weaken the state’s standards by eliminating teacher-testing requirements. But Terry Stoops, a former schoolteacher and the education policy analyst for the Raleigh-based think tank, wrote in his new Spotlight briefing paper that North Carolina’s testing requirements have been miscast as rigorous and shown to be largely irrelevant in promoting teacher quality.
“Unfortunately, state license policy often assures that mediocre but credentialed teachers remain in public schools,” Stoops said, “while prohibiting talented but non-credentialed applicants from entering the teaching profession.”
Stoops used North Carolina’s performance on national tests as well as data on teacher testing and certification to test whether there was a connection. There wasn’t one.
One of North Carolina’s teacher certification requirements is qualifying passage of the Praxis II test, which assesses content and specialty area knowledge. Stoops said that this test varies greatly among states, with almost half of the states not even requiring it. Students in the states that required the Praxis II did not out perform students in states that did not require the test, he stated.
Stoops also looked at North Carolina’s ranking as first in the country in the percentage of teachers obtaining National Board Certification. There was no apparent correlation to student performance, and none of the top 11 states in student test scores had a significant number of teachers with National Board Certification.
“Such credentials make little difference because they do not improve the skills of teachers or student achievement,” Stoops said.
Stoops’ findings were consistent with those of other research, such as a recent report from the National Council on Teacher Quality. It found that master’s degrees, years of experience, testing, certification, and education coursework were not associated with higher student performance. The report showed, instead, that the best teachers are those who attended selective colleges and are outstanding readers and writers.
“Our goal should be to recruit the highest-quality teachers for our children, rather than finding teachers who have jumped through all the hoops,” Stoops concluded.
Terry Stoops’ Spotlight, “The Certification Myth: Teacher Certification Does Not Improve Student Performance,” is available on the John Locke Foundation website. For more information, contact Stoops (tstoops@johnlocke.org) or Summer Hood (shood@johnlocke.org) at (919) 828-3876.