Liscensure



The Current Situation
In the past, state governments handled teacher licensing. Many states now set up autonomous boards to handle the licensing process. (http://www.uky.edu/Education/TEP/usacert.html) When shortages occur, schools often hire unlicensed teachers and allow them to meet licensing requirements after they have begun teaching students. At the moment, 40 of the 50 states allow their schools to hire teachers who have not received their license to teach. As a result of this practice, more than 50,000 teachers enter the field each year without their teaching license (The San Francisco Chronicle (eds.), 1996, 10).
Even when teachers do meet their licensing requirements, there is much skepticism about whether these standards really distinguish qualified from unqualified applicants. Standards emphasized in the procedure may not completely relate to the training offered at the candidate’s school of education. Most current assessments look at applicants’ college courses, and require some sort of written examination. The exams measure general knowledge about teaching, and do not examine the applicant’s knowledge of his/her academic subject. The assessments also give little consideration to practical experience, and examples of classroom performance. Legislators have become frustrated to the point of looking for ways around licensing, not only as a way to fight shortages, but also because they feel the current system unnecessarily deters qualified candidates from becoming teachers.

Proposed Reforms
In 1987 the Council of Chief State School Officers formed the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) (http://www.ccsso.org/intasc.html) so that states could work together on licensure problems. INTASC is a collaborative organization composed of 30 state education departments, the two major teachers’ unions, many schools of education, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the National Board for Professional Teacher Standards, and prominent teaching organizations. The organization has devised standards that it believes applicants must meet before receiving a license to teach. In addition to improving the current standards for teacher licensure, the INTASC standards fit cohesively in a system of teacher development guided by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education’s (NCATE) reforms for teacher training , and the National Board for Professional Teacher Standard’s (NBPTS) criteria for advanced certification .

Parts of the standards involve an evaluation of an applicant’s teaching performance(s). The standards measure performance through tapes of the applicant teaching, and portfolios that might include lesson plans, graded student work, and self-evaluations. The performance component examines whether the applicant can apply the pedagogical tools that taught in education school, and necessary for effective teaching. Accompanying this performance exam is a written exam covering issues such as child development, and teaching and learning styles. The third part of the evaluation will assess the candidate’s knowledge of his/her academic subject area. Research on teaching has found that "Successful teachers possess specialized knowledge about how to teach their particular subjects." (http://www.edweek.org. /ew/vol-16/34intasc.h16)

Since the INTASC developed its reforms through collaboration between over 30 states, the reforms have a great deal of governmental support. Unlike with NCATE’s teacher training reforms, INTASC does not assume responsibility for assessing applicant compliance. Rather, INTASC works with state education departments to institute the reforms, which the states then administer themselves. Already, over half the states in the consortium are using INTASC’s standards in their licensure procedures. These reforms have the additional benefit of coherence with standards for teacher training and advanced certification proposed respectively by the NCATE and NBPTS. The current movement towards these standards suggests they will likely become an integral part of the licensing process in most states. These standards will probably not be mandatory for all practicing teachers. The emergency measures that allow schools to hire unlicensed teacher when faced with severe shortages will probably remain, unless economically disadvantaged urban and rural schools can provide their students with qualified teachers through measures like improved teacher recruitment procedures.