Secondary Teacher Preparation in Social
Studies: Arizona

Delivering Well Prepared Teachers Policy

Goal

The state should ensure that social studies teachers know all the subject matter they are licensed to teach.

Does not meet goal
Suggested Citation:
National Council on Teacher Quality. (2011). Secondary Teacher Preparation in Social Studies: Arizona results. State Teacher Policy Database. [Data set].
Retrieved from: https://www.nctq.org/yearbook/state/AZ-Secondary-Teacher-Preparation-in-Social-Studies-6

Analysis of Arizona's policies

Secondary social studies teachers in Arizona have the option of a general social studies teaching field license. Candidates are required to pass the AEPA "Social Studies" test. Teachers with this license are not limited to teaching general social studies but rather can teach all core academic social studies classes. Further, although Arizona requires secondary teachers to be highly qualified in each specific subject area (e.g., history, geography), this requirement does not ensure that they will have passed a content test.

There is an optional middle grades social studies endorsement for teachers who already have either an elementary or secondary certificate. Teachers holding a valid elementary or secondary teaching certificate who want to attach a middle grades social studies area must pass the AEPA "Middle Grades Social Studies" test. Arizona also allows middle school social studies teachers to teach on a generalist K-8 license (see Goal 1-E).

Citation

Recommendations for Arizona

Require secondary social studies teachers to pass tests of content knowledge for each social studies discipline they intend to teach.
States that allow general social studies certifications—and do not require content tests for each area—are not ensuring that these secondary teachers possess adequate subject-specific content knowledge. Arizona's assessment combines all subject areas (e.g., history, geography, economics) and does not report separate scores for each subject area. Therefore, candidates could answer many—perhaps all—history questions, for example, incorrectly, yet still be licensed to teach history to high school students.

Require middle school social studies teachers to pass a test of content knowledge that ensures sufficient knowledge of social studies.
Although the state requires a specific middle grades social studies test for its middle grades social studies endorsement, this endorsement is optional. Therefore, Arizona does not ensure that all middle school teachers possess adequate knowledge of social studies.

State response to our analysis

Arizona recognized the factual accuracy of this analysis.

Research rationale

Carlisle, J. F., Correnti, R., Phelps, G., & Zeng, J., "Exploration of the contribution of teachers' knowledge about reading to their students' improvement in reading." Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 22, 459-486 (2009) includes evidence specifically related to the importance of secondary social studies knowledge.
 
In addition, research studies have demonstrated the positive impact of teacher content knowledge on student achievement.  For example, see D. Goldhaber, "Everyone's Doing It, But What Does Teacher Testing Tell Us About Teacher Effectiveness?" Journal of Human Resources, vol. XLII no.4 (2007).  Evidence can also be found in White, Presely, DeAngelis "Leveling up: Narrowing the teacher academic capital gap in Illinois," Illinois Education Research Council (2008); D. Goldhaber and D. Brewer, "Does teacher certification matter? High School Certification Status and Student Achievement." Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. 22: 129-145. (2000); and D. Goldhaber and D. Brewer, "Why Don't Schools and Teachers Seem to Matter? Assessing the impact of Unobservables on Educational Productivity." Journal of Human Resources (1998). See also Harris, D., and Sass, T., "Teacher Training, Teacher Quality and Student Achievement." Teacher Quality Research (2007).