Boosting Teacher Standards May Backfire, Study Finds

Raising academic standards for prospective teachers, a widely advocated approach to educational improvement, may be a good idea in theory, but in practice it could boomerang, reducing the overall quality of the work force in America’s classrooms.

Moving too quickly to raise standards for admission to teacher colleges and lifting the minimum scores required to win state certificates could aggravate existing teacher shortages and drastically reduce the already small number of African American and Latino instructors, especially in large urban centers, such as Los Angeles.

Those are among the conclusions of a new study released Wednesday by researchers for the Educational Testing Service and American College Testing Inc., the two leading college admission testing organizations.

“The mere act of raising passing scores [on teacher certification exams] will not be the silver bullet for solving the teacher quality problem,” the report said.

The study’s results also challenge the old canard: “Them that can, do; them that can’t, teach.” Researchers found that future math, science and English teachers in America’s middle and high schools actually outperform their fellow college graduates on average when it comes to standardized college admission tests.

And once they are in college, many future teachers in these core subjects achieve high grade-point averages.

But the good news about the nation’s much-criticized teachers is tempered with bad. SAT (the Scholastic Aptitude Test administered by ETS) and ACT scores are below average for the large number of future teachers preparing to work in elementary schools, as well as for physical education teachers and those going into special education, the study found.

While not opposing the drive to raise academic qualifications of future teachers, the ETS/ACT researchers warned that a rush to raise the bar for those seeking to become teachers could have unintended consequences.

Educators See Need for Caution

“We are not trying to suggest that teacher standards should not be raised,” said Andrew S. Latham, one of the ETS researchers. “But we need to be aware of the impacts and proceed with caution.”

Latham’s concern was echoed by others in the teacher-training field.

Said Carolyn Evertson of Vanderbilt University, who has also studied the issue of teacher quality: “We don’t know everything” about what makes a successful teacher, she said, “and until we do, I wouldn’t rush out” to change standards.

Evertson was especially concerned about making negative judgments about elementary school teachers because their SAT or ACT scores lagged behind the average for other college-bound students. Academic skills are only part of what it takes to be a successful teacher, she said, and that may be especially true in elementary classes.

The risk in raising academic requirements is that many parts of the country, including Los Angeles as well as other parts of California, are already experiencing serious teacher shortages--with even greater shortages expected in the years just ahead.

Student enrollments are growing. Tens of thousands of veteran teachers hired during the baby boom era of the 1950s are reaching retirement age. And many states, including California, have added to the demand for new teachers by reducing class sizes. All told, U.S. schools are expected to need about 2 million new teachers in the next decade.

Raising the minimum passing scores on teacher certification tests would result in teachers with greater academic ability, the study predicted, but it would also reduce the number of teachers who pass the tests, especially African Americans and Latinos.

50% Cut in Minority Representation Seen

At present, almost nine out of every 10 teachers are white. Since minority students generally do less well on standardized tests than whites, raising the minimum scores required for admission to teaching could slash the number of new teachers who belong to minority groups by as much as 50%, the report estimated.

The idea that future teachers tend to be academically inferior to their peers, and that these academic weaknesses are a major factor in the shortcomings of American education, is commonplace in discussions of educational reform.

“Typically, reformers charge that teaching does not attract high-caliber students and argue for higher academic standards for pre-service teachers, including more selective entrance requirements for colleges of education, more rigorous course work for education majors and more challenging licensure requirements” for future teachers, the report said.

No matter how high the standards are set, it is not easy to attract highly talented students into teaching in a booming economy because private-sector jobs offer far higher pay. A few states, notably Connecticut, have had some success boosting teacher qualifications by paying salaries of $50,000 a year and more to teachers, but these are the exceptions.

The most commonly cited evidence of prospective teachers’ academic shortcomings is the fact that, among college-bound high school seniors taking the SAT or ACT, those who say they intend to become educators have lower test scores than fellow high school test-takers who say they plan to work in other fields.

The ETS/ACT research team argues that drawing conclusions about future teachers on the basis of what a group of high school students say they will do years down the road is unwarranted because many of those who express an interest in teaching never actually work in classrooms.

Instead, the researchers based their comparisons on students who took and passed two other standardized tests: the widely used set of exams for admission to colleges of education, known as Praxis I, and the exams commonly used by states for those seeking licenses to teach, known as Praxis II.

When SAT and ACT scores of these students--who were much more likely to become teachers--were compared with their peers’, the results showed that many teachers are, in fact, well qualified academically, especially those moving into junior and senior high schools.

The results were less encouraging among prospective teachers heading for elementary schools, physical education or special education classes.

For these students, about 45% of the sample, average SAT scores did lag behind those of comparable students in other fields.