Certification

Teacher Certification in the United States

In the United States, the responsibility for granting beginning teachers their licenses or certificates is borne by the state departments of education. Each of the 50 states has its own guidelines and qualification standards that must be met before a person is deemed certified to walk into a classroom to teach children. These state certification guidelines must be instituted by any university or college (private or public) that has a teacher education program within the specified state.

Because these guidelines are created independently by each state, there is often little consistency among the states' requirements. For example, in 2000, according to Education Week, 39 states required candidates for teacher certification to pass a basic skills test, but most of those states (36) had some sort of legal loophole that permitted some of the people who fail the exam to teach with a type of emergency or alternative certification. Quality Counts 2000, an annual 50-state report by Education Week, reported on teacher certification differences by stating that as a result of loopholes in state requirements, ‘millions of students sit down every day before instructors who do not meet the minimum requirements their states say they should have to teach in a public school’ (p. 8).

An attempt to address this apparent lack of uniformity in qualifications for some teachers came with the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, which was signed into law in January 2002. One portion of the 670-page NCLB Act of 2001 deals with ‘highly qualified teachers.’ This stipulation that each state must ensure that every public school elementary and secondary teacher is ‘highly qualified’ before stepping in front of a classroom is a prime component driving certification standards. Highly qualified teacher requirements of NCLB are listed as a bachelor's degree, state certification, and demonstrated competency (as defined by the state) in each core subject that the teacher will be teaching. Many states are relying on standardized testing such as the PRAXIS™ series of tests to meet the ‘demonstrated competency’ in each core subject. For many states, passing scores on various forms of the PRAXIS™ test in the core academic subjects that certification candidates intend to teach are required before certification is granted. Special education teachers and those who teach English-language learners must also demonstrate competency in the core subjects that they teach. (According to NCLB, these core subjects are English, reading or language arts, math, science, history, civics and government, geography, economics, the arts, and foreign language.)

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