Teachers from certain other states could start working in South Carolina classrooms more quickly under a House committee advanced Thursday.

The bill, which passed out of the Education and Public Works Committee 14-4, would make South Carolina the to join a compact agreeing not to make teachers reapply for the certification they need before starting instruction.

“We’re doing our best to fill vacancies in our classrooms with safe, sound, well-educated people, not very, very kind but untrained substitutes who are filling our classrooms,” said Rep. Shannon Erickson, a Beaufort Republican who leads the committee and sponsored the bill.

Under existing law, anyone licensed to teach in another state must when they move. Approval from the state education department depends on how well their home state’s requirements align with those in South Carolina.

Automatically accepting out-of-state licenses could speed up the process and make things easier for teachers coming into the state, teachers’ advocates and supporting legislators said.

Educators who went through the process of getting a teaching license in another state shouldn’t have to start over just because they’ve moved, said Dena Crews, president of the South Carolina Education Association.

“They’ve done the work already,” Crews said. “That needs to count for something.”

The compact initially started in 2023 with the goal of helping military families, who often need to move with little notice.

For teachers married to military members, moving to a state with an agreement that accepts their licensure could reduce some of the stresses of relocating, said Patrick Kelly, a teachers’ advocate with Palmetto State Teachers Association. He gave Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, home of House Speaker Murrell Smith, as an example.

Moving is already a difficult process, and attempting to get the paperwork together to apply for certification can make it even harder, Kelly said.

“Anything we can do to diminish the burden on those families that are already serving our nation through uniform service, I think that’s just commonsense policy,” Kelly said.

The agreement would go beyond military families. Anyone moving into the state would be able to start teaching as soon as they found a job, potentially creating another avenue to fill the the state still had at the beginning of this school year.

That was a dramatic drop from the record-high number of vacancies schools reported after the COVID-19 pandemic, but anything the state can do to get more teachers is a good thing, Kelly said.

Plus, the state could then harness its recent influx of residents, said Ryan Dellinger, director of education policy for conservative think tank Palmetto Promise Institute. Many of those moving are retirees , but others might be certified teachers looking for a new job, he said.

And even more might decide to move into the state with the agreement in place, Dellinger said.

Neighboring states North Carolina and Georgia have not yet joined the compact, so a teacher looking to move to the Southeast without a specific location in mind might choose South Carolina because they know they’ll have an easier time transferring their certification, Dellinger said.

Under the agreement, “South Carolina is suddenly a very competitive place to live,” Dellinger said.

If North Carolina and Georgia did decide to sign agreements of their own, that could also help the state’s recruitment efforts, Kelly said. Teachers just over the South Carolina border might decide to start teaching in the state if they didn’t have to get another certification, he said.

“I’d love to make it even easier for their certified educators to come to South Carolina and work with our students,” Kelly said.

That could cut both ways.

Other states would recognize South Carolina’s certification in turn, potentially drawing some teachers away. But with the state’s growth and recent improvements in teacher salaries and working conditions, that’s not likely to make a major difference, Kelly said.

Last year, the Legislature passed the which, among other things, made renewals of teacher certificates easier, guaranteed planning time, and required districts to tell teachers their expected salaries before they sign contracts.

As for pay, the state’s minimum salary for first-year teachers has risen from $30,113 in 2017 to $48,500 this school year.

Following the governor’s recommendation, the House’s first draft of the state budget would increase state-paid minimums by $2,000 across the , which pays teachers by years of experience and college degree. That means no first-year teacher could make less than $50,500 next school year. Many districts pay above the minimums.

“This is a place where educators want to come work,” Kelly said. “Let’s make it to where they can come and do it.”

How much time and trouble the proposal would save teachers moving from a state within the compact would vary.

Under the existing process, the timeline depends on how quickly teachers can get together the information needed for the application. Kelly likened it to the process of getting a passport.

“How quickly you can do that is dependent on how quickly you can put your hands on the paperwork that you need,” he said.

Teachers with less than three years of experience must pass tests to gain additional certificates required. And all newly arriving teachers, regardless of their experience, must complete an evaluation of their skills before they can receive a long-term state certificate that renews with professional development, according to the Department of Education.

The proposal would erase those steps for teachers coming from a state within the compact.

‘Simply an option’

Most of the pushback on the bill Thursday came from several of the House’s most conservative members, who worried about the state giving too much of its authority to other states, especially those with Democratic majorities.

Teachers in Washington, for instance, are required to undergo training on diversity, equity and inclusion to earn their teaching certifications, which could influence their teaching, said Rep. Stephen Frank, a member of the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus. Or, the commission overseeing the compact might try to pressure South Carolina into accepting similar requirements, he said.

“While on day one I don’t see that posing a great threat to us, in this compact, it sets up this commission, which will then promulgate rules, and we have no idea what those rules may be or may become,” the Greenville Republican said.

While the bill makes it easier for out-of-state teachers to hunt for jobs, schools don’t have to hire them, Erickson said. And South Carolina keeps control of its licensing process, meaning the commission would have no control over how it certifies teachers, she said.

“It simply allows an open door in one piece — literally one piece — of their qualification to not have to wait,” Erickson said. “It’s not saying that they have to be hired. It’s simply an option.”

South Carolina has agreements to recognize out-of-state licenses for other professions, including nursing, physical therapy, mental health therapy, social work and corrections officers, Erickson said. Boating licenses also apply between states.

Teachers should get the same treatment, Erickson said.

“I think these partnerships are really important,” Erickson said. “They’re a good way of making sure that if you do have someone who’s saying, ‘Oh, well, I might want to move in this area of the country right now, we’re going to stand out.’”

“That’s really never a bad thing,” she added.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com.

The Department of Education is hiring fewer teachers and seeing an uptick in unlicensed educators in its schools, according to a recent  for the 2024-25 academic year. 

Last year, roughly 48% of newly hired Hawaiʻi educators did not have a teacher’s license, a significant jump from the 27% of new teachers who didn’t have one in the 2020-21 academic year. The numbers include those who have completed an educator preparation program but have not yet earned a state teaching license. 

The number of unlicensed educators, also known as emergency hires, has steadily increased since the pandemic, partly due to the recent increase in pay for these workers. The state also has programs in place to help emergency hires earn their license while teaching.

This fall, DOE reported the lowest number of  in five years, largely due to the uptick in emergency hires filling open positions. Emergency hires can work in schools for up to three years while they make progress toward earning a license. 

The department hired 1,300 teachers last year, down from more than 1,600 the year before that. Of those teachers, 82% were Hawaiʻi residents — the largest percentage of resident hires DOE has seen in the past four years.

Fewer teachers also left Hawaiʻi schools last year, with 1,116 retiring or resigning from their jobs, down from roughly 1,200 the year before. Most commonly, teachers said they left their jobs because they planned to move out of Hawaiʻi. 

The state has introduced more initiatives to improve teacher retention in recent years, including bonuses for educators working in hard-to-staff positions and increasing teacher pay. 

During Thursday’s Board of Education meeting, Assistant Superintendent Sean Bacon said the DOE is continuing to work on recruiting local teachers. For example, he said, schools are developing more career pathways for high school students interested in becoming teachers or educational assistants after they graduate. 

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy and “Data Dive” is supported in part by the Will J. Reid Foundation.

This wave of backlash, forced by America’s culturally anxious fretting over whether “their” country is too fast for their liking, is nothing new. In fact, the anti-immigrant, anti-Black pendulum swing in the United States, usually after periods of progress, is about as predictable as it gets. 

Fortunately, there’s ample evidence that this — the ugly, illiberal drama — too may pass. The United States continues to grow more racially, ethnically, linguistically and culturally , and this panoply of human riches is showing up in our schools. This is particularly clear when it comes to languages on campus — there are over in U.S. schools than there were in 2000, and their . 

Dual language classrooms offering academic instruction in two languages (and often English learners and English-dominant children) . This is of American public schools today — plural, polyglot campuses adjusting their pedagogies to meet the needs of a wide range of learners. 

And yet, it’s no simple matter to make those adjustments. While talk of national teacher shortages appears to be premature, demand for has long outstripped supply. American teachers are disproportionately and monolingual — a major stumbling block for schools hoping to offer more bilingual learning opportunities. The country can’t have more bilingual schools, let alone dual language programs, unless it trains, hires and retains more teachers who can work proficiently in languages other than English. 

Policymakers are working on the problem. The U.S. Department of Educationin Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence Program grants to support the training of more racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse teachers. The dozen grantees chosen in this round of the competition encompass a large number of institutions prioritizing teacher diversity that includes language considerations. is using its $1.5 million grant to train, certify and place more than 100 bilingual teachers. Importantly, its program will include cohorts of Spanish-English bilingual teacher candidates and Haitian Creole-English bilingual teacher candidates. is using its grant to recruit Latino teachers to work in bilingual settings. 

These investments will help expand access to bilingual education around the country, a goal with myriad benefits drawn from multiple fields of research. First, a raft of studies show that English learners do best in schools that support their emerging bilingualism. Dual language is the for helping English learners maintain their bilingualism, , and . It also appears to support . 

Further, studies that students gain academically from having teachers who match their racial or ethnic identities. Dual language programs may produce unique benefits in this regard if members of their linguistically and culturally diverse teaching staff resemble the identities of their students. And indeed, a large majority of dual language schools offer instruction in — and regularly rely upon large numbers of Spanish-dominant Latino teachers. Most English learners are . 

Finally, that often , like an improved ability to . And that’s to say nothing of the and advantages the country gains from fostering a polyglot society. 

But all of this research — and correspondingly high family demand for bilingual instruction in communities around the country — won’t lead to expansions of bilingual and dual-language schooling on their own. As one of us outlined in , many state training and licensure systems remain largely hostile to multilingual teacher candidates, existing dual language schools are sometimes established to provide bilingual instruction to English-dominant children — even as English learners are consigned to English-only instruction, and so forth. 

So there’s more for policymakers to do. Federal and state leaders should consider prioritizing investments in teacher training programs with a track record of producing high-quality bilingual teachers. This must include alternative teacher training programs, which tend to be than traditional programs. Indeed, in March, the Biden administration the country’s investment in the Augustus F. Hawkins grants from $15 million to $30 million. 

And state policymakers should consider updating their teacher licensure systems to remove chokepoints — like English-only licensure exams — that prevent linguistically diverse teacher candidates from reaching the classroom. States should also optimize the linguistically diverse staff already serving in their classrooms — many of whom are aides or paraprofessionals — and fund pathways to help them become lead teachers. 

Or, you know, they could ignore the challenge of growing our bilingual teacher corps — an opportunity sparked by genuine progress and improvement in American schools — and focus their energies on demagoguing over the book selection in elementary school libraries. This really shouldn’t be a tough choice. 

Up to 4,400 educators could be affected, including thousands who had been promised full licenses after three years as provisional teachers. But many now would be forced to go back to school and re-earn their credentials at a traditional college of education in the state once their temporary license expires.

Most devastating for the state’s highest-needs students: The proposed change could impact 2,000 special educators, a category of teachers in desperately short supply. A 74 analysis of newly available state data reveals that schools serving the children with the most profound and intense disabilities would lose the largest share of their teaching staff — many needing to replace two-thirds, or more. 

A number are located in rural areas that have long struggled to recruit educators with specialized skills. More than 84% of Minnesota school systems report enough of these teachers, particularly those specializing in autism spectrum disorder, emotional behavioral disorder and learning disabilities.

• In Minneapolis, a school for students with volatile behavior would lose six of its 10 teachers.
  
• A public charter school catering to autistic students would lose four of its six faculty members.
  
• Three rural multidistrict programs serving children whose needs are too specialized for their small, home districts would lose three-fourths of their teachers.

• A number of language-immersion schools and career-technical education programs could lose two-thirds of their teachers, while numerous schools where 90% or more of students are impoverished stand to lose 50% to 75%.

Who would fill those suddenly empty classrooms is unclear. 

The affected teachers earned their credentials under a reformed system that was intended to ensure that enrolling in traditional colleges of education is not the only way to become a Minnesota teacher. But the board created five years ago to oversee that system is dominated by in-state training programs and the statewide teacher union that represents their faculties, and has tried repeatedly to repeal most of the new ways to qualify for a teaching license.

The idea of once again requiring the vast majority of would-be teachers to enroll in colleges of education is rooted in the belief they will be better educators, says Yelena Bailey, executive director of the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board. “We have had really good experience with people who did [traditional] teacher prep,” Bailey told �鶹��Ʒ. “People who have demonstrated mastery of professional standards tend to do better and stay longer.” 

This claim, however, is not based on any localized analysis of the proposed reform or the state’s teacher training landscape. Minnesota requires schools to evaluate teachers but does not compile or analyze the resulting data. Nor has it examined the effectiveness of its teachers colleges or of educators with non-traditional backgrounds who were licensed after the system changed in 2018.    

The board has asked lawmakers for $800,000 to help the special education teachers pay to earn new credentials — a subsidy that works out to $400 a head. 

The bill would leave intact a brand-new rule allowing experienced teachers licensed in other states to work in Minnesota, as well as a handful of startup training programs outside of higher ed for people with a bachelor’s degree in a field other than education. 

Data Analysis

Top 50 Schools with the Highest Percentage of Tier 1 & 2 License-Holders

Data analysis by Beth Hawkins/�鶹��Ʒ

In 2016, after a decade of pushback by the education college lobby and the union, the state’s Legislative Auditor recommended a wholesale reboot to Minnesota’s teacher credentialing system. In addition to being virtually impossible to navigate for anyone who did not graduate from a traditional training program, the auditors noted, the rules for who qualified for a license were arbitrary and contradictory.  

Educators hoping to move to the state with degrees or teaching experience elsewhere often were required to submit course syllabi, exam results or other old, hard-to-resurrect information to prove their preparation was “substantially equivalent” to what they would have learned in Minnesota. 

If they could not show that, they were told to take classes or work toward a new degree from one of the state’s colleges. Among other problems, this made it nearly impossible for a teacher trained at a Historically Black College or University or a Tribal College to get a license without starting over — an issue in a state with a nearly all-white teacher corps. 

For some native speakers of Somali, Hmong, Karen and other languages hoping to work in immersion schools, as well as plumbers, mechanics, IT specialists and other people hoping to teach in career prep programs, there weren’t — and, in many cases, still aren’t — Minnesota training programs for their particular license area. 

In a bipartisan compromise opposed only by the colleges of education and the union, in 2017 lawmakers created the new board and rules allowing people who had not earned a degree from an in-state college of education to demonstrate their teaching abilities with other credentials or classroom experience elsewhere.

Under a new, four-tiered system, people who completed a Minnesota educator preparation program could get permanent tier 3 and 4 licenses. Those using the new alternate criteria were limited to temporary tier 1 or 2 credentials.

Tier 1 licenses are good for one year and may be renewed three times — perhaps more if the teacher works in a high-needs area.  

Tier 2 was the chief category designed to provide alternatives to earning a degree at a Minnesota teachers college. Anyone with a tier 2 license — which requires significantly more experience than tier 1 — who gets good classroom evaluations for three years is eligible to apply for a full credential. By last year, the first in which most were eligible, 99 tier 2 licensees had moved up to permanent credentials.   

Opponents started pushing back even before the reform went into effect for the 2018-19 school year. Out of the gate, however, the tiered system proved popular — and effective at licensing educators to work in shortage areas. , 4,400 of the state’s 80,000 working teachers were on a tier 1 or 2 license, with another approximately 8,000 holding other, pre-existing, credentials that allow certain teachers to work outside their area of licensure. 

The first two times the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board asked lawmakers to sever the path from a short-term to a permanent license, dozens of teachers with Ph.D.s and years of experience in other states showed up to protest. Their main argument was that even in its infancy, the new system was quickly diversifying the ranks of the state’s educator workforce. One-fourth are people of color, compared with 6% of Minnesota teachers overall. 

This year, with union-backed Democrats in charge of all three branches of state government, a third version of a bill to change the new system is enjoying relatively smooth sailing. Its chances were helped by an amendment that would grandfather in some teachers currently moving from temporary to permanent status. It’s unclear how many would qualify for that protection. 

Document courtesy ED Allies

A number of educators and school system leaders have complained that lawmakers this year limited the testimony they would hear in opposition to the bill. Among those who ended up submitting written statements instead were associations representing the state’s school boards, school administrators, rural districts and the Minnesota Administrators for Special Education.

The chair of the state House Education Policy Committee, Laurie Pryor, did not respond to requests for comment regarding complaints about restrictions on the number of testifiers.        

None of the debate has touched on the disproportionate impact rolling back the new law would have on special educators, who have been in short supply for decades. Right now, tens of thousands of children with disabilities are not getting legally mandated pandemic recovery services because there are not enough teachers with the credentials to serve them.  

Last summer, one of the largest employers of tier 1 and 2 educators, Minneapolis Public Schools, announced it was moving its academic recovery services for its most challenged students online — a possible violation of law — because it could not find enough educators to staff its programs. Almost two months into the 2022-23 school year, the 28,000-student district was still short about 130 special educators.

In March, Minneapolis’s tier 1 teachers started to get their annual notices that they are being excessed — removed from their jobs for potentially weeks or months, pending a district decision to rehire them. Because of the shortages, they typically have more alternatives than other teachers who lose their jobs, which translates to churn for the schools that lose them. 

“This exacerbates instability for schools,” says Paula Yadel Cole, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of Educators for Excellence. “They think, ‘If there’s another district that’s willing to hire me, that’s where I am going.' ” 

Understaffed special education classrooms pose problems that compound on one another, she adds. A shortage in an individual school puts pressure on the remaining special educators to serve larger caseloads. 

The solution often proposed — state-funded scholarships for these teachers to enroll in traditional colleges of education — still leaves root causes of the special educator crisis unaddressed. 

“There’s this denial, I think,” Cole says. “I am just worried we are not taking this teacher shortage seriously.”

For two decades, advocates and policy experts have decried a nationwide lack of flexibility in training, recruiting and compensating special ed teachers. Educators who want to work with students with disabilities often have to do extra coursework — which means more debt — to take a job that involves significant amounts of paperwork and, in the case of teachers who work with behaviorally challenged kids, responsibility for a segregated classroom.

To the barriers to persuading teachers to enter special education, add the hurdles to keeping them there. Research shows that some 20% of new special educators who also hold general-ed licenses don’t choose to work in special education. Among those who do, turnover is higher than in other specialties. that between the 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years, special educators were 11% more likely to leave the classroom and 72% more likely to change schools than general education teachers. 

According to published two years ago by the Learning Disabilities Association of Minnesota, less than a fifth of those with the appropriate licenses are working in special education, while more than a fourth of inactive teachers hold special education licenses. Some 38% of teachers who fall into the long-existing categories “special permission” and “out of compliance” are working in special ed. 

Few Minnesota districts have experimented with paying special educators more in recognition of their extra training and higher workloads. However, St. Paul Public Schools recently announced that, in anticipation of 70 unfilled special education positions for 2023-24, it will pay a $10,000 bonus to qualified applicants — including teachers already in the district who are willing to change assignments. It will also give $2,000 to any current tier 2 special educator who earns a tier 3 credential by November 2023.

In February, a number of Educators for Excellence members — some at risk of losing their hard-to-fill jobs — asking lawmakers to wait to determine whether the licensing rules truly need to change until there is data on how well the teachers who have taken advantage of the new credentialing system are doing. 

“Sadly, this provision has been attacked every single year in the five years since it became effective” they said. “Why rush to dismantle the system before we’ve had an opportunity to see the full impact on student experience and achievement?” 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and the Joyce Foundation provide financial support to Educators for Excellence and �鶹��Ʒ.

Across the country each year, thousands of teaching candidates get ready to begin their classroom careers. They finish up their graduate coursework, start scanning excitedly for job openings — and then fail their states’ teacher licensure exams. Dejected and daunted by the prospect of retaking the test, many never become teachers.

It’s a distressing pattern that has been documented for years and increasingly draws the focus of policymakers attempting to diversify the profession. As more experts point to the improved academic performance of students who are assigned to even one instructor of the same racial or ethnic background, some advocates have called for states to modify, or , their licensure tests, which are more likely to be a stumbling block to African American and Hispanic candidates.

by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a reform-oriented think tank based in Washington, D.C., puts the issue in perspective. Data gathered from 38 states and the District of Columbia show that a huge portion of prospective elementary school teachers don’t pass their licensing exam on the first try. Of those that fail, non-white teachers are much less likely to re-take the test than their white classmates. And within states, students at different institutions faced radically different odds of ultimately securing a teaching credential. The conclusions will lead many to wonder whether novice educators are receiving enough training before being hired, and what can be done to assist those who weren’t adequately prepared.

NCTQ president Kate Walsh, a longtime and often critical observer of teacher prep programs, said in an interview that while the results were themselves “terrible,” a more pressing concern was the sheer difficulty of obtaining the evidence. State authorities should be active in publicizing that information, she argued, but many don’t even bother to collect it, and even federal efforts to investigate these questions have been “mired in confusion.”

“What’s interesting to me is that states didn’t have this data,” Walsh said. “We thought they did, but almost all states said that this was the first time they’d ever seen this data.”

The national findings, encompassing program-level exam results between 2015 and 2018, demonstrate clearly that large numbers of graduate students struggle to reach the finish line and become licensed teachers. Across all states that provided data, the average “best-attempt” rate for prep programs — the rate at which test-takers ever pass the test, whether or not they fail on their first try — is 83 percent, meaning that roughly one in six don’t realize their ambitions. And certain programs do much better than others: The average gap between the highest-performing and lowest-performing institutions in each state was 44 percentage points.

What’s more, 29 percent of all prep programs reported that less than half of their teaching students passed the licensing exam on their first try. Six states (Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Virginia) were home to at least one program in which no teaching candidate did so.

Florida, which the fourth-most teachers of any state, offers a revealing example. In the three years studied, two different teacher prep institutions saw no teaching candidates pass the Florida Teacher Certification Examinations their first time, though both are tiny programs serving roughly a dozen students between them. Many others — including Florida International University, Florida Gulf Coast University, University of North Florida, and University of Central Florida — reported first-time pass rates of 41 percent or less. All of those schools, which collectively produced over 2,300 test-takers, were rated by NCTQ as among the most selective in the state.

At the same time, a huge number of Florida’s prospective teachers who failed their licensure tests the first time go on to pass in later attempts, likely with the support and encouragement of their prep programs. And a substantial number of programs enrolling large numbers of low-income students (measured via their eligibility to receive Pell grants) report higher first-time pass rates than the average across the state.

Dan Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington who directs the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), called the data “compelling,” adding that researchers might fruitfully study which institutions are able to work best with teaching candidates who initially stumble with the exam.

The findings “begin to open up the teacher preparation black box a little bit and point to where we should be looking for different supports, curricula, interventions that seem to be able to help teacher candidates while they are in teacher preparation,” Goldhaber said.

Dodging the ‘heat’ of publication

In order to reach their findings, NCTQ first had to receive the data from states. A 2019 study, using national results for the commonly used Praxis exam that were provided by the testing vendor ETS, offered somewhat similar findings, but did not delve into differences by state or institution.

Acquiring results at that more granular level was much harder, Walsh said, because some local authorities “didn’t want the heat of being the ones to publish this data.” In all, seven states did not provide timely data on licensure exam performance, and eight provided only partial data. Of the states that did share their data with NCTQ, some had to be subjected to public records requests.

Meagan Comb, director of the Wheelock Educational Policy Center at Boston University and a one-time NCTQ fellow, said she wasn’t particularly surprised at the challenges posed by a third-party examination of test results. In a two-year stint as the director of educator effectiveness at Massachusetts’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Comb oversaw the state’s policy on both teacher preparation and licensure. She recalled that many in the state — considered a national leader in the collection and dissemination of education data — had ached for more information because “it was really hard to know how our pass rates compared with other states.” This often included program heads themselves, who didn’t always have a clear picture of which student groups were struggling or what aspects of the test gave them trouble.

“This report shows that you have to invest in data infrastructure,” Comb Said. There are a lot of states that can’t even link their teacher workforce with their teacher prep candidates, or there’s a state statute prohibiting them from looking at the efficacy of their teacher candidates. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in states across the country to think a lot about the data infrastructure they provide to teacher preparation programs for continuous improvement.”

Goldhaber noted that bottlenecks on data can arise in different areas. While some state education departments are “more inquisitive than others,” he acknowledged, schools of education would often prefer that low pass rates float under the radar.

“I think that, sometimes, the politics are really hard,” he said. “You have important political constituencies — deans, and everything they bring — who sometimes don’t want these data to be out there.”

Lack of transparency can be damaging not only to state authorities, and prep programs themselves, but also to prospective graduate students, some of whom will enroll unwittingly in a teacher prep program where they stand a significant chance of not gaining a license. The risk of failure is especially great for teaching candidates of color, who are significantly less likely than white candidates to retake the exam if they fail. The stress and expenses associated with the test, often amounting to hundreds of dollars in fees or preparation materials, can act as a roadblock to attracting more diverse teachers.

Walsh said that on grounds of consumer protection alone, that had to change.

“The whole point is, you’re supposed to be preparing candidates for licensure. And nobody points out to the kids going into these programs, ‘Your chances of getting a license at this institution are nil.’ So they take their money, take their time, and that’s it.”

Disclosure: The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation provide financial support for both the National Council on Teacher Quality and �鶹��Ʒ.