Photo Finish: Certification Doesn't Guarantee a Winner.

The July 2006 deadline came and went for states to comply with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate to have a highly qualified teacher in every classroom. To meet the standard, teachers must have a bachelor's degree, be state-certified, and prove they know the subjects they teach, either by satisfying minimum course-taking requirements or passing a test in the subject they teach. But will compliance ensure that students learn more? Does state certification make teachers better at fostering student learning? It is now possible to provide some answers to these questions by exploring the relative effectiveness of recently hired New York City public school teachers who entered the profession through alternate routes. Using a large data set provided by the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE), we analyzed student test scores as well as information about the students, their teachers, classrooms, and schools. With this rich array of data, we compared the effectiveness of recently hired alternatively certified (AC) and uncertified teachers to that of their traditionally certified counterparts in improving student learning in math and reading during grades 4 through 8. The results of our study of New York City public school teachers confirm a simple truth: some teachers are considerably better than others at helping students learn. For example, elementary-school students who have a teacher who performs in the top quartile of all elementary-school teachers learn 33 percent of a standard deviation more (substantially more) in math in a year than students who have a teacher who performs in the bottom quartile. Yet as we embrace this piece of conventional wisdom, we must discard another: the widespread sentiment that there are large differences in effectiveness between traditionally certified teachers and uncertified or alternatively certified teachers. The greatest potential for school districts to improve student achievement seems to rest not in regulating minimum qualifications for new teachers but in selectively retaining those teachers who are most effective during their first years of teaching. New Routes to the Classroom State laws were originally designed to regulate teacher quality by specifying minimum pre-service course-taking and exam performance. Reflecting these traditions, the majority of prospective public-school teachers have completed one or two years of full-time study in a university education program and passed exams such as the widely used PRAXIS tests to satisfy those requirements. In the 1990s, that traditional system for regulating the flow into teaching began to break down. Faced with difficulties recruiting enough certified teachers, many school districts hired large numbers of uncertified teachers. When No Child Left Behind and state laws mandated a certified teacher in every classroom, districts turned to the growing number of teachers entering the profession through alternative certification (AC) programs. According to the National Center for Education Information (NCEI), 48 states and the District of Columbia currently have AC programs, and approximately 50,000 teachers became certified through alternative routes in 2004-05. NCEI estimates about one-third of all new teachers enter the field with alternative certification. Participants in the AC programs are usually required to possess a bachelor's degree and pass state licensing exams before entering the classroom and to enroll in a teacher-education program, taking coursework at night, during their first years in teaching. We wanted to know whether staffing classrooms with uncertified and AC teachers shortchanges students. In other words, are students essentially paying the cost of training these teachers on the job, in the form of lost academic achievement? Knowing the relative merits of traditionally certified, AC, and uncertified teachers is particularly important because AC and uncertified teachers are more likely to work in urban areas with low-income and low-achieving students, those most in need of a high-quality teacher who can foster their learning. …