Modern News

Nevada, like most states, requires potential teachers to become certified by the state. In Nevada, teachers must hold a bachelor’s degree with 22 credit hours devoted toward “professional education” coursework, including eight credit hours of unpaid student teaching. After the coursework students are required to take Praxis examinations which cost several hundred dollars. Potential teachers in Nevada will spend up to four years and thousands of dollars just to become licensed. Once a teacher becomes licensed by the state, they must continually renew their teaching certification.

Why do we require teaching certification requirements, especially if we are in need of new teachers? Teacher license and certification requirements have been put in place under the assumption that they will improve the quality of teachers.

However, critics of certification requirements have contended that students and minorities are harmed by the process. Research by the Brookings Institution has shown that there is virtually no difference between the effectiveness of a certified teacher and an uncertified teacher.

This means that teacher certification requirements reduce the supply of effective teachers available for Nevada to hire. The graph below shows that there is virtually no difference between a certified and uncertified teacher in their ability to improve student performance in Math.

Nevada, like many states, has strong certification requirements and no real path toward alternative certification. Without real alternative pathways for qualified individuals to become teachers, Nevada effectively closes itself off to many potentially effective teachers. This means that Nevada’s efforts to reduce class size have only had the result of increasing the likelihood that Nevada’s students are exposed to ineffective teachers.

Beyond harming students, teacher certification requirements also harm minorities who aspire to become teachers.

Research by Paul Peterson of the Hoover Institution found that states with real alternative teacher certification programs not only saw significant gains in student achievement but that the percentage of minority teachers increased as well. States with real, not symbolic, teacher certification pathways see a teacher population that is more reflective of state demographics.

Florida created real alternative pathways for becoming a teacher, and today about half of all new teachers in Florida are alternatively certified. The proportion of minority teachers has also increased to a level that more closely resembles the makeup of the state population.

In Nevada, however, minorities make up 41 percent of the population but less than 9 percent of our teachers. Florida, by contrast, has a minority teacher population that more closely resembles the ethnic makeup of the state. The Nevada Policy Research Institute wrote in a recent article “the Nevada legislature can remedy the situation, improving instructional quality and student achievement while also raising the number of minority teachers. All lawmakers need to do is eliminate the state’s restrictive and useless teacher certification requirements.”

Source: U.S. Department of Education and Hoover Institution