One of the familiar refrains echoing throughout this election year has been that we must ensure that all students have access to highly capable teachers. A laudable goal to be sure. But how best to achieve it? The most common solution, embraced by many Democrats and Republicans alike, is to raise the bar for teachers, primarily by imposing more stringent licensure testing requirements on potential teachers prior to entry into the profession. On one level, this proposal has inherent appeal. After all, doctors, lawyers, and others take professional exams to ensure their competence, so it stands to reason that professionals entrusted with the critical job of nurturing youth should meet similar requirements. And the states have responded in the past 15 years, as teacher licensure testing has exploded onto the scene, to the point where it is a fixture in nearly every state today. What are the true effects of teacher licensure testing? Is it really a panacea for mediocre teaching?

Let's look at three critical issues: teacher academic ability, teacher supply, and teacher diversity. Proponents of teacher licensure testing frequently cite the need to ensure an academically capable teaching force. One way to look at this issue is through teachers' SAT and ACT scores. This is not to imply in any way that candidates who perform well on these college admissions tests will automatically make good teachers, nor that candidates who perform poorly cannot excel as teachers. Nonetheless, at least two lines of reasoning support the validity of studying these scores. The first is that if schooling is to be considered an academic enterprise, then it seems only logical that teachers be drawn from among the more academically able.

All things being equal, academic ability is clearly a desirable trait in teachers. A second reason to look at SAT and ACT scores comes from growing evidence that verbal ability, as measured in the standardized test scores of teachers, is positively related to students' test scores.

Educational Testing Service (ETS) develops and administers its Praxis series of teacher licensure tests in approximately two thirds of the states. In a study published in 1999, ETS researchers found that those teachers who passed Praxis tests had significantly higher college admissions test scores than those who did not pass. Although this finding should not come as a huge surprise, it does add some quantitative validity to the argument that teacher licensure tests do succeed in the sense that they raise the aggregate academic ability of those permitted to enter the teaching force.

Unfortunately, most proponents of licensure testing stop here and do not dig deeper to examine issues of teacher supply and diversity. The push to raise teacher quality invariably includes a call not only to require licensure testing, but also to raise the minimum passing scores required on such tests. Yet the ETS study presented some ominous data about increasing passing scores only moderately. If the highest passing scores currently used in any one state were implemented across all states, for example, fewer than two thirds of all candidates would pass the Praxis licensure tests. This is at a time when numerous researchers have identified a tremendous dearth of new teacher candidates, the most commonly cited figure being the need for more than two million new teachers within the next 10 years. If we are already facing an impending teacher supply crisis, and raising licensure passing scores moderately will eliminate more than one third of the potential candidates from the teaching pool, where will that supply differential be made up?

Some might argue that losing one third of potential teachers is a necessary evil — they would disagree with the notion that standards should be lowered to get more teachers in the classroom. But right now, this is precisely what happens when passing scores are raised, because stop-gap measures (e.g., emergency certification, teaching out of certification area) are used to deal with the supply crisis. Worse, the schools hit hardest by a supply crisis tend to be those with the most challenging teaching environments, typically poor urban schools. Thus not only do the students in these schools face a tough climb out of poverty, they often face it with the least qualified teachers. So if done in isolation, raising passing scores just means finding new loopholes to circumvent supply problems. The real solution, of course, lies in making teaching a more appealing profession in the first place. This can be accomplished through measures like salary increases, reductions in class size, and greater professionalization through more time in the classroom and less time supervising the cafeteria. Ironically, imposing higher standards without concomitantly increasing teaching's allure will have a detrimental effect on the overall quality of the teaching force.

Another disturbing aspect of raising passing scores in isolation involves the lack of racial/ethnic diversity in the teaching force. The ETS study found that without other interventions, the supply of minority teaching candidates would be hit the most severely by moderate increases in passing requirements. For example, only one third of African-American candidates in the study would have met the higher licensure test passing scores. And the teaching force is already nearly 90 percent white. The data do not in any way suggest that minority teaching candidates cannot and should not be required to meet high standards for entry into the teaching profession. They do suggest, however, that if passing scores are to be raised without radical changes in the recruitment and adequate training of talented minority candidates, teachers will continue to be far less diverse than the students they teach.

The data in the ETS study provide compelling evidence that higher testing standards will lead to a teacher population with higher mean academic ability. Teacher testing, especially when implemented with high passing scores, has a major payoff in terms of the mean academic skill of the prospective teacher pool. However, looming supply problems, coupled with bleak passing rates and disparities among racial/ethnic groups, suggest that any moves to adopt higher standards must be accompanied by aggressive efforts to support and enhance all candidates' knowledge and abilities so that they stand a better chance of meeting those high standards. The mere act of raising passing standards is not a silver bullet solution for improving teacher quality. Testing with higher standards holds great promise for ensuring that teachers are academically able; however, if not used judiciously, such testing can also exacerbate already daunting problems with the supply and diversity of potential teachers.

A former seventh grade English teacher, Andy holds a Ph.D. in Education Psychology and has published his research in journals including Educational Leadership, Journal of Teacher Education, and Journal of Personal Evaluation in Education. His research has been cited in various publications including Education Week.

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