Discussion

New America’s national scan of state educator policies shows a moderate upswing in the number of states encouraging or allowing the use of something labeled as micro-credentials in at least one policy area. This tally rose despite our exclusion of states that have not provided funding for implementation of their laws authorizing educator micro-credential initiatives (such as Virginia and Texas), and of states which tacitly allow educators to use micro-credentials to satisfy license renewal requirements but have no policy explicitly stating this (such as in the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania) (see Appendix F for more details) Within the 32 states incorporating micro-credentials, just under half (14) are leveraging them across two or more educator policy areas, indicating that the depth of micro-credentials’ inclusion within states is increasing as well.

Furthermore, the number of states with these policies will likely soon increase further, as a handful of states are in the process of revisiting policies to incorporate micro-credentials or similar tools to encourage demonstration of teacher competency. For example, staff at the Idaho Department of Education shared plans to embed micro-credentials in the process for career and technical education teachers to make the mandatory progression from a temporary certificate to a professional certificate, and staff at the Vermont Agency of Education shared that the state’s Professional Standards Board has developed a draft policy which would allow teacher candidates who come close to passing the content area licensure exam to demonstrate competency in the content area through alternative means, including micro-credentials. Additionally, Alabama passed a law in 2024 requiring the State Superintendent of Education to establish a system for approving professional learning for teacher license renewal that incorporates micro-credentials, and Mississippi is adopting a professional learning approach that does not use the term micro-credential but nonetheless reflects many of the characteristics of high-quality micro-credential offerings.¹

However, the educator policy landscape is still evolving with regards to micro-credentials, and most states are only dipping a toe in the water, rather than diving in. Many states initiate their policies as pilots and/or in a specific area of need, such as with Indiana’s pilot program to provide a small number of current educators with computer science training.² And most states are not mandating the use of educator micro-credentials but offering them as one of several available options to meet a given policy’s requirements. This type of flexibility is nearly always the case for states’ initial certification and license renewal policies, which tend to provide educators with multiple options for fulfilling requirements, but is less likely for curated, topic-specific professional development opportunities, such as with Maryland’s science of reading micro-credential. This means that most educators engaging with micro-credentials are doing so voluntarily, and it is unclear how many are choosing to do so. To encourage uptake, a handful of states are offering micro-credentials at no cost to educators as an incentive, with a few even offering a stipend for completing micro-credentials on a topic deemed of importance to the state.

Additionally, even though more states have explicit policies for educator micro-credentials in every category analyzed than in 2020, a few states that had integrated micro-credentials at the time of our 2020 scan have since walked them back. For example, in Tennessee, pilot programs were not continued or scaled up, as priorities shifted with new state leadership and the onset of COVID-19. However, the state continues to use educator micro-credentials in other policy areas. And Washington state’s legislature passed a law prohibiting the state education agency from adopting or implementing educator micro-credential policies beyond its initial pilot before the pilot had concluded.³

That said, states’ increased interest in leveraging micro-credentials to reach their educator policy goals is generally a positive one, as it reflects a commitment to seek out innovative, high-potential approaches for developing, credentialing, and retaining talented educators who have the skills to meet students’ needs.

Yet it is not the micro-credential label that is critical for addressing the core challenges states face in strengthening their educator workforces. Instead what is most important is providing opportunities for educators to engage in a rigorous cycle of inquiry and to develop and apply competencies in a real-world setting. While not the focus of our research, there is little evidence that most states are putting sufficient guardrails in place to ensure the consistently high level of micro-credential quality necessary to improve teachers’ skills.

In fact, a closer look at some states’ micro-credential offerings indicates that they are more akin to completing a handful of online courses than they are a way to learn and practice relevant competencies within a specific school or classroom context. Online modules might be an appropriate way for states to ensure that every educator is exposed to and retains baseline information on a certain topic. But even if these modules require a multiple-choice assessment for completion, the results provide no insight into whether educators know how to apply any information learned in their work with students, whether they are attempting to do so, or how effectively they are doing so.

Without a vetted, trusted process for determining which micro-credential offerings are high quality, policymakers, schools, and educators alike remain in the dark about which ones are likely to add value to educators’ professional practice, and states will fail to harness the potential of micro-credentials for improving teaching and learning.⁴ The Micro-Credentials Partnership of States—convened by digiLEARN and RTI, and consisting of Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Wyoming⁵—attempted to address this by developing quality assurance standards (QAS) for educator micro-credentials and an accompanying rubric for assessing micro-credentials against those standards in 2023.⁶ North Carolina has officially adopted the QAS rubric as its tool for determining which micro-credentials hold currency within state educator policies, and the other three states are also beginning to incorporate it as a micro-credential vetting tool.⁷ While the QAS tool holds promise, further validation and research of the rubric, and training for those using it, are needed to know whether it can reliably and fairly vet the quality of educator micro-credentials.

Additionally, without shifts in the design of state and local policies—for example, providing teachers with clear incentives for engaging with micro-credentials, such as more opportunities for career advancement and increased compensation that do not require moving into administration—states cannot harness some of the most powerful aspects of high-quality micro-credentials. For states to reap the positive potential impacts of micro-credentials on their educator workforces, they must first put systems and processes in place to ensure the quality of micro-credential offerings, and then ensure that policies are designed to incentivize educator engagement with them.