Middle School Teacher Preparation : Georgia

Delivering Well Prepared Teachers Policy

Goal

The state should ensure that middle school teachers are sufficiently prepared to teach appropriate grade-level content.

Best Practice
Suggested Citation:
National Council on Teacher Quality. (2011). Middle School Teacher Preparation : Georgia results. State Teacher Policy Database. [Data set].
Retrieved from: https://www.nctq.org/yearbook/state/GA-Middle-School-Teacher-Preparation--6

Analysis of Georgia's policies

Georgia requires middle grades certification (grades 4-8) for all middle school teachers. Teacher preparation programs must prepare candidates in at least two of the following areas of concentration: reading, language arts, mathematics, science or social science. The state defines an area of concentration as a minimum of 15 semester hours.

All new middle school teachers are required to pass a specific subject-area test, one of the "Georgia Assessments for the Certification of Educators" tests, to attain licensure.

Citation

Recommendations for Georgia

State response to our analysis

Georgia recognized the factual accuracy of this analysis.

Research rationale

A report published by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (NMAP) concludes that a teacher's knowledge of math makes a difference in student achievement. U.S. Department of Education. Foundation for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education (2008).

For additional research on the importance of subject matter knowledge, see Dee and Chodes, "Out-of-Field Teaching and Student Achievement; Evidence from Matched-Pairs Comparisons." Public Finance Review (2008); as B. Chaney, "Student outcomes and the professional preparation of 8th grade teachers," in NSF/NELS 88: Teacher transcript analysis (Rockville, MD: Westat, 1995); H. Wenglinsky, How Teaching Matters: Bringing the Classroom Back Into Discussions of Teacher Quality (Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service, 2000). For information on the "ceiling effect," see D. Goldhaber and D. Brewer, "When should we reward degrees for teachers?" in Phi Delta Kappan 80, No. 2 (1998): 134-138.