Extended Emergency Licenses: Tennessee

Exiting Ineffective Teachers Policy

Goal

The state should close loopholes that allow teachers who have not met licensure requirements to continue teaching.

Nearly meets goal
Suggested Citation:
National Council on Teacher Quality. (2015). Extended Emergency Licenses: Tennessee results. State Teacher Policy Database. [Data set].
Retrieved from: https://www.nctq.org/yearbook/state/TN-Extended-Emergency-Licenses-73

Analysis of Tennessee's policies

Tennessee does not offer emergency licenses.  Tennessee's initial license (the Practitioner License) requires admission to or completion of a preparation program, a bachelor's degree and passage of all required content and pedagogy tests. Candidates with a bachelor's degree in a core content area can delay passage of licensure tests for up to three years.



Citation

Recommendations for Tennessee

Ensure that all teachers pass required subject-matter licensing tests before they enter the classroom.
While Tennessee is commended for not allowing teachers in the classroom on an emergency license, the state's new provisional license is problematic in that teachers may potentially teach for up to three years without having passed a content test. The state should require all teachers to meet subject-matter licensure requirements prior to entering the classroom regardless of whether or not they possess a content area major.

State response to our analysis

Tennessee was helpful in providing NCTQ with facts necessary for this analysis.

Research rationale

Teachers who have not passed licensing subject-matter tests place students at risk.
While states may need a regulatory basis for filling classroom positions with a few people who do not hold full teaching credentials, many of the regulations permitting this put the instructional needs of children at risk, often year after year. For example, schools can make liberal use of provisional certificates or waivers provided by the state if they fill classroom positions with instructors who have completed a teacher preparation program but have not passed their state licensing tests. These allowances are permitted for up to three years in some states. The unfortunate consequence is that students' needs are neglected in an effort to extend personal consideration to adults who cannot meet minimal state standards.

While some flexibility may be necessary because licensing tests are not always administered with the needed frequency, the availability of provisional certificates and waivers year after year signals that even the state does not put much value on its licensing standards or what they represent. States accordingly need to ensure that all persons given full charge of children's learning are required to pass the relevant licensing tests in their first year of teaching, ideally before they enter the classroom. Licensing tests are an important minimum benchmark in the profession, and states that allow teachers to postpone passing these tests are abandoning one of the basic responsibilities of licensure.

Extended Emergency Licenses: Supporting Research
Research has shown that "the difference in student performance in a single academic year from having a good as opposed to a bad teacher can be more than one full year of standardized achievement." See E. Hanushek, "The Trade-Off between Child Quantity and Quality," The Journal of Political Economy, Volume 100, No. 1, February 1992, pp. 84-117. Hanushek has also found that highly effective teachers can improve future student earnings by more than $400,000, assuming a class of 20.  "The Economic Value of Higher Teacher Quality", National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 16606, December 2010.