The teacher pipeline concerns currently being debated in the media are not new. They’re merely the most recent iteration of a slow-burning problem that has become more acute since Covid school closures upended K–12 education. One suggestion for boosting the number and diversity of new teachers is to relax licensing requirements. It’s no secret that these can be onerous, expensive, and time-consuming enough to deter or derail many potential candidates. Relaxing them has been tried before, but not without concerns of lowered teacher quality. New research shows interesting results for one such effort that could be instructive going forward.
Fearing incipient educator shortages more than 30 years ago, and with the only extant alternative being to fill pressing vacancies with uncertified teachers via emergency permits, Texas passed a law in 1999 designed to promote flexibility in teacher preparation pathways. This was meant to boost the number of certified candidates available for hire and gave the State Board for Educator Certification (SBEC) authority to establish alternative routes to certification beyond typical four-year college degrees, district-run programs, and the like, which had been the longstanding means for training and certifying teachers in the Lone Star State. In carrying out this authority, SBEC in 2001 scrapped the requirement that preparation programs include student teaching. This opened the floodgates for alternative programs (including those run by non-profit and for-profit companies) that certified candidates’ classroom readiness via course grades and test scores only. Traditional programs remained, well, traditional.
Such alternatives are faster and cheaper than completing a traditional four-year degree with additional student teaching requirements. But do they produce more candidates? Do they reduce reliance on wholly uncertified placeholders? And how good are the teachers thus certified?
To dig into those questions, researchers Christa Deneault of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and Evan Riehl from Cornell University examined detailed datasets that include measures of worker supply and quality. Sources include the Texas Education Agency, SBEC, and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Data include all teacher certifications, all public school employees, and all public school students enrolled in the state from 1996–2019, along with demographics and value-added data for math and English language arts tests in grades 4–8.
They find that the plan achieved its primary goal admirably and quickly. The total number of initial certifications—i.e., individuals receiving their first teaching certificate—rose from roughly 14,000 in 2000 to 28,000 by 2007, driven in large measure by those attaining alternative program certification. Growth flattened after that but alternative pathways continued to produce 50 percent or more of all new teacher certifications through the end of the study period in 2020.
The multiple upsides to this hiring bounty include decreased reliance on uncertified teachers (by a whopping 25 percentage points between 2000 and 2010) and diversification of the teaching corps. To wit: Teachers certified through alternative pathways were more diverse than their traditionally-certified counterparts—16 percentage points more likely to be male and 8 percentage points less likely to be white. Eighty-five percent of teachers from traditional programs majored in just two academic fields in college (interdisciplinary and humanities studies). By comparison, alternatively-trained teachers were more likely to have degrees in business, communications, social sciences, and STEM subjects. In other words, they were more representative of college graduates as a whole and somewhat better aligned with the subjects that K–12 schools teach. Additionally, a majority of traditionally-trained teachers who were hired ended up in elementary schools, while teachers from alternative programs were more likely to teach—and displace uncertified teachers—at harder-to-staff middle and high school grades.
Teacher turnover rates—a proxy for teacher quality, as excessive turnover has been linked to negative impacts on student achievement—are largely similar for both groups of certified teachers, with about 70 percent of new hires still teaching after five years, regardless of how they got certified. Alternatively-certified ELA and math teachers produced modestly lower (but still statistically-significant) value-added scores in both subjects. Teachers certified through for-profit alternative programs scored lower on all measured outcomes compared to their non-profit alt-cert peers, but uncertified teachers were lowest of all on every measure. They were most likely to leave the profession within five years and had the worst value-added scores of any other subgroup.
Deneault and Riehl conclude that allowing alternative-certification programs—for-profit and non-profit alike—achieved Texas policymakers’ goal of filling educator vacancies, even though the new hires were of somewhat lower quality than traditionally-certified teachers. Interestingly, they consider “reducing schools’ reliance on uncertified teachers with even worse outcomes” to be a “net zero” impact on students, when it likely should be seen as a positive result. Without them, the ranks of uncertified—and even-lower-quality—placeholders would surely have grown. And an accurate, documented perspective seems especially important now, since history seems to be repeating in Texas, where a resurgence in the hiring of uncertified teachers, supercharged by post-pandemic hiring incentives, has resulted in a predictable academic downturn. That, in turn, has moved the state legislature to eliminate the use of uncertified educators once and for all by 2029. The next phase is unpredictable, but at least the researchers will be watching.
SOURCE: Christa Deneault and Evan Riehl, “Should States Reduce Teacher Licensing Requirements? Evidence from the Rise of For-Profit Training Programs in Texas,” NBER Working Paper (September 2025).
