Secondary Teacher Preparation in Social
Studies: Florida

Delivering Well Prepared Teachers Policy

Goal

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

Meets goal in part
Suggested Citation:
National Council on Teacher Quality. (2011). Secondary Teacher Preparation in Social Studies: Florida results. State Teacher Policy Database. [Data set].
Retrieved from: https://www.nctq.org/yearbook/state/FL-Secondary-Teacher-Preparation-in-Social-Studies-6

Analysis of Florida's policies

Florida only offers secondary certification in general social science. Candidates must either earn at least a bachelor's degree with a major in social science, social studies, history, political science, geography, sociology, economics or psychology or at least a bachelor's degree with 30 semester hours in social science or social studies that include six semester hours in U.S. history, along with coursework in the following: Western civilization or European, Asian, African, Latin American or Middle Eastern history; economics; the U.S. government; geography; and sociology or psychology. Candidates must also pass the FTCE "Social Science" test. Teachers with this license are not limited to teaching general social studies but rather can teach any of the topical areas.

Middle school social studies teachers in Florida must earn at least a bachelor's degree with a major in social science, middle grades social science or middle grades social studies or a bachelor's degree with 18 semester hours in social science or social studies that include six semester hours in U.S. history, along with coursework in the following: Western civilization or European, Asian, African, Latin American or Middle Eastern history; economics; U.S. government; and geography. Candidates must also pass the FTCE "Middle Grades Social Science" test.

Florida has approved the repeal of its middle grades integrated curriculum certification, which will now ensure specific content certification rather than an integrated model. 

Citation

Recommendations for Florida

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 only require a general knowledge social studies exam—are not ensuring that these secondary teachers possess adequate subject-specific content knowledge. Florida'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 history questions, for example, incorrectly, yet still be licensed to teach history to high school students.

State response to our analysis

Florida was helpful in providing NCTQ with the facts necessary for 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).