CTE Teacher Licensure and Long-Term Student Outcomes

We use longitudinal data from Massachusetts that link high school course-taking records in career and technical education (CTE) to postsecondary student outcomes to provide the first empirical evidence linking characteristics of CTE teachers to later student outcomes. We find that CTE teachers who received better scores on subject performance tests required for licensure tend to have students with higher longer-term earnings than CTE teachers who received lower scores on these tests, controlling for other factors. Specifically, we estimate that a 1 standard deviation increase in teacher performance on these tests is associated with about a $1,000 increase in average expected earnings for the teacher's students 5 years after their expected graduation date, controlling for licensure test area and observable differences between students.

Who’s assessing the assessment? The cautionary tale of the edTPA

In 2019, Drew H. Gitomer, Dan Battey, and José Felipe Martínez published a paper detailing apparent violations of fundamental principles and norms in the reporting of technical information about the edTPA, a widely used high-stakes assessment for teacher licensure. In this article, they describe and criticize the lack of appropriate response to these concerns by state and professional institutions. Without such institutions providing guardrails to ensure professionally ethical practices, protections are compromised for those most directly affected by assessments. This is a story about edTPA but has implications for assessment more broadly.

From NCLB to ESSA: Implications for Teacher Preparation and Policy

With the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the term highly qualified teacher (HQT) became an important component of teacher licensure, including for special educators. However, when ESEA was reauthorized in 2015 as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the highly qualified regulations were removed. The purpose of this study was to look back at the historical record of policy implementation of HQT and compare the record across states to provide implications for teacher preparation and licensure policy in the era of ESSA. This was accomplished through a review of the history of special education teacher licensure and completion of a comprehensive analysis of state licensure requirements under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. Despite a general consistency across three domains (i.e., degree, examination, and licensure) of the highly qualified statute, inconsistencies among states at both the elementary and secondary levels of special educator licensure may yield significant challenges related to the impact of teacher quality on student outcomes. Better understanding of these challenges is important as policymakers will be better able to make decisions regarding what teachers need to know prior to entering the field to meet students’ needs and generate student achievement.

How Can Preservice Teaching Programs Help New Teachers Feel Prepared to Address Absenteeism?

Background Though policy makers are beginning to hold schools accountable for reducing chronic absenteeism, little attention has been paid to the role of teachers. No known study has examined whether rising cohorts of new teachers feel prepared to address this challenge. This is particularly problematic given that teachers with less experience tend to be less efficacious at reducing students’ absences. Research Questions (1) Do newly graduating teachers feel as if they have sufficient knowledge about chronic absenteeism? (2) Do newly graduating teachers feel prepared to address absenteeism? (3) Do these perceptions differ by elementary versus secondary preservice graduates? Subjects Our study collected survey data from the 2017–2018 graduating cohort of general education teacher candidates from a statewide university system in California. This system prepares, on average, 800 teaching candidates a year, and all general education candidates participate in teacher licensure. We surveyed the teaching candidates in the 2017–2018 graduating cohort from these campuses and had a response rate of 60%. Survey measures included teacher background data and perceptions of the effectiveness of their preparation programs, knowledge of absenteeism, and perceived ability to address absenteeism. Research Design We began with a baseline model in which our outcome measures (knowledge and ability to address absenteeism) were regressed on teachers’ background characteristics and perceptions of the efficacy of their preparation programs. We augmented this model by including university fixed effects, such that we only explore variation within program rather than across universities. Results Our findings suggest that preservice teachers who found their programs to be helpful, who felt supported by supervisors, and who found usefulness in their field placements also felt as though they had greater knowledge about chronic absenteeism and how to address it. The results were differentiated by elementary versus secondary candidates. Conclusions Given our students’ extreme rate of missing school days, it is of immediate importance to determine if we are preparing our nation's newest teachers to help address the current crisis. Our study fills this gap by looking at the influence that teacher education programs (specifically teacher licensure requirements) might have in contributing to teachers’ perceptions of being prepared to graduate and attend to attendance.

The practice of licensure, the licensure of practice

Licensure tests play a critical role in any profession. Well-designed tests both delineate the core competencies that are required to enter a profession and provide evidence that candidates can safely practice in the profession. They also identify the professional knowledge and skill that differentiates any educated individual from the well-prepared professional. Geoffrey Phelps and Gary Sykes use a series of assessment tasks to illustrate how teacher licensure testing can be designed to focus more directly on assessing aspiring educators’ performance of the professional competencies that make up the day-to-day and moment-to-moment work of teaching.

State-wide implementation of edTPA in preparation for high-stakes testing: A mixed-methods study of the concerns of edTPA coordinators

This study examined the implementation of high-stakes adoption of edTPA® in one state in the year prior to consequential use of edTPA scores for teacher licensure. Using a mixed methods design, we investigated concerns of coordinators who were responsible for edTPA implementation in their institutions. We utilized the Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) to understand edTPA coordinators’ Stages of Concern, the nature of the challenges they faced, and the professional development opportunities that alleviated their concerns. Based on the CBAM survey, the most common Stage of Concernfor edTPA coordinators was Management.Coordinators’ interviews revealed the nature of their concerns at different stages and how the size of their institution and supportive resources at particular times may have played a crucial role in shaping the edTPA roll-out in their institutions. The use of the CBAM framework enabled edTPA coordinators (a) to understand their own concerns about the high-stakes policy, (b) to articulate the complexities involved in implementing edTPA initiatives, and (c) to underscore the importance of relating concerns to appropriate professional development opportunities and support for themselves as well as their faculty.