ABSTRACT
Discussions of teacher quality in U.S. public schools have tended to focus on teacher licensing. Reformers from diverse perspectives have proposed “raising the bar” for licensing by various means (e.g., harder licensing exams, more coursework, graduation from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education teacher-training programs, elimination of emergency or provisional licensing). However, all of these proposals assume that teacher licensing plays an important role in determining teacher quality and performance. In this article I argue the contrary. Raising the bar for teacher licensing in ways that have been proposed is unlikely to have any significant short-or long-term effects on student achievement. Moreover, by shrinking the applicant pool for vacancies, these restrictive proposals may have the perverse effect of lowering average teacher quality, particularly for high-poverty or rural districts that already face thin applicant pools. A preferred approach is to swap regulation of inputs for accountability for outputs, that is, a more 16flexible licensing regime that relaxes entry barriers combined with greater accountability for student achievement gains. Such a proposal is based on a simple economic principle: Welfare is more likely to be improved if state regulators focus on what they can measure (student achievement), not what they cannot (teacher quality).
