Piloting Performance-Based Licensure to Ease Testing Disparities

A key part of preparing a high-quality workforce is ensuring that all teachers possess a baseline level of knowledge, skills, and competencies. Every state requires that prospective teachers pass a series of exams in order to obtain licensure. In 26 states, including Mississippi, they are also required to pass a basic skills test to be admitted into an educator preparation program.¹ Research on the relationship between teacher certification exams and student achievement is mixed.² But several studies³ have concluded that teacher effectiveness in the classroom is not strongly associated with performance on certification exams.⁴ Intended to set a high bar for entrance into the profession, these exams have had the unintended consequence of preventing and discouraging entry into teaching. Multiple studies document disparate pass rates between candidates of color and their white peers.⁵ These discrepancies mean that some candidates have to take tests multiple times, which is a cost burden, and may be another factor that discourages candidates from entering the profession.

Gaps in PreK–12 and postsecondary education are contributing to disparate pass rates on licensure exams in Mississippi. While the state’s PreK–12 education system has made progress in recent years in raising student achievement and closing racial achievement gaps, large inequities remain. As reported in the Hechinger Report, recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that “white fourth graders were twice as likely to score proficient on their reading test as their black peers. The state’s overall scores also hide deep disparities in its poorest, most isolated districts… and the gulf in academic outcomes is indisputable.”⁶ In addition, the state ranks near the bottom of all 50 states in terms of early education spending and the percentage of children served, with only 5 percent of four-year-olds enrolled in public preschool.⁷

Analysis from Mississippi Today notes that gaps in postsecondary education are also contributing to disparate pass rates on licensure exams in the state.⁸ Using data and research by the National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ), the article details how the content offered in elementary education programs is often poorly aligned with the content on licensure exams. In Mississippi, the majority of educator preparation programs studied “require students to take less than half of the classes recommended” by NCTQ to help ensure candidates are able to pass the licensure exam. MDE has started to offer test preparation sessions to help boost passing rates, while a non-profit in the state, Regional Initiatives for Sustainable Education, is also working to help fill these holes by providing tutoring support for the exam.

With 2015’s Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal government eliminated its mandate for licensure exams⁹ and left it up to states to define and determine the criteria for teacher effectiveness. States have used that flexibility to study gaps in testing outcomes¹⁰ and to devise solutions to testing barriers such as eliminating some required exams.¹¹ A handful of states are allowing subject-area teachers to use micro-credentials to demonstrate necessary competencies to attain new teaching endorsements,¹² and one state has left the door open for the potential of initial teacher licensure.

Mississippi is taking a novel approach by exploring the potential for teachers to earn licensure based on their impact and effectiveness in the classroom. In the fall of 2019, MDE launched a performance-based licensure (PBL) pilot¹³ that aims to develop standard licensure policy recommendations for the State Board of Education based on student achievement and evaluation data collected during the three-year study.¹⁴ The three-year program is being funded by the same grant as the state’s teacher residency program. (See Box: Changes In Testing Requirements Due to COVID-19)

Currently, school districts are employing a large number of teachers with emergency credentials to fill staffing gaps—nearly 12 percent of teachers working in high-poverty schools.¹⁵ Many of these teachers have struggled to pass the state’s teacher licensure exam,¹⁶ which has placed them at risk of being pushed out of the profession. Consider: in the summer of 2019, Jackson Public Schools stood to lose over 200 teachers because they had not been able to pass the required Praxis Core exam.¹⁷

Courtney Van Cleve, who worked as a principal in Clarksdale before starting at MDE, saw these struggles first hand, “Any number of phenomenal teachers that I encountered in the Delta experienced challenges with licensure exam passage and yet were getting incredible results with their students while leading really positive and culturally affirming classrooms,” she told us.¹⁸

Van Cleve’s observation was not a one-off. District stakeholder interviews found that teachers with temporary credentials were both highly experienced and positively impacting student learning, as measured by state and local assessment data. Given these findings, there was urgency at MDE to develop strategies to remove these barriers and expand pathways to licensure. According to Dr. Cory Murphy, Executive Director of the Office of Teaching and Leading at MDE, licensure exams are designed to determine whether someone has gained the knowledge deemed necessary to be able to safely practice in the content area they will be teaching. Yet, given the realities in Mississippi, he wondered whether the current system of relying on exams was the only way to confirm that teachers possess those knowledge and skills.¹⁹

In 2018, MDE began holding focus groups and interviews with stakeholders across the state to learn more about the opportunities and barriers facing the teacher workforce. Teacher entry and licensure exams were consistently raised as a barrier, which confirmed the need to create alternate methods for determining the qualifications and skills needed to enter the profession.²⁰ However, creating alternatives does not mean that the state is trying to lower the bar, but rather trying to develop more expansive pathways that still hold candidates to high expectations.

As it was developing the performance-based licensure (PBL) pilot, MDE convened more focus groups with parents, students, teachers, prospective PBL candidates, superintendents, and principals in interested school districts. The goal of these sessions was to go through the different prototypes of PBL and identify elements that worked or that needed to be changed. “We were flexible on the design until we got the model right for districts in Mississippi,” said Van Cleve.²¹

The three-year PBL pilot includes 73 teachers working in districts across the state. While districts have autonomy to select candidates for the program, the state has set baseline criteria for candidate eligibility. Candidates must have a bachelor’s degree, evidence of their effectiveness in the classroom, and three years of lead teaching experience (e.g., long term substitute or provisional license) or five years of experience as a teaching assistant. In each year of the pilot, PBL districts must submit data showing candidates’ effectiveness and impact on student learning. While standard licensure will be pending policy recommendations for the State Board of Education based on student achievement and evaluation data collected during the study, candidates are offered a teacher salary by their district and the opportunity to engage in intense Praxis and/or ACT assessment preparation sessions. Districts have flexibility to determine what combination of measures they will use to document teacher effectiveness, but it must include a measure of student growth over the year. “There are certain assessments like STAR, MKAS, MAAP and so the districts select whatever product they are utilizing as the measure,” said Murphy.

Amanda Johnson, principal and founder of Clarksdale Collegiate Public Charter School, expressed enthusiasm about the pilot and its potential. She said, “I have one teacher in the program,” working in kindergarten, “who has been teaching for a number of years on an emergency license and she gets our best results.”²² The results used to determine this teacher’s effectiveness include student growth targets on NWEA MAP and on kindergarten readiness assessments from the beginning and end of the year.

In reflecting on the initial phase of the pilot, Van Cleve emphasized the importance of working closely with districts and engaging them as co-creators of the model to ensure that it fits their needs. The pilot has helped affirm the state’s commitment to increasing both teacher diversity and effectiveness. All PBL candidates in the first cohort are Black, compared to only 27 percent of the overall teacher workforce (47 percent of students are Black).

The PBL pilot has already caught the attention of other states who are exploring alternate pathways to licensure, according to staff at MDE. Additionally, Massachusetts’s Commissioner of Education Jeffrey Riley wants to pilot alternative assessments²³ to provide teacher candidates with more options for demonstrating the competencies and skills necessary to earn licensure.²⁴ Like in Mississippi, these include comprehensive performance reviews to assess a teacher’s pedagogical knowledge and skills in practice. The proposal would also allow teacher preparation programs to assess a candidate’s subject-matter knowledge and submit documentation to the state department of education.