by Lance T. Izumi, Fellow in California Studies
Pacific Research Institute
June 26, 2001

Announcer lead: Time for Perspectives. Lance Izumi says that having a teacher credential doesn’t guarantee the quality of a teacher.

A common reason given for the poor performance of California’s public-school students is the lack of fully credentialed teachers trained at university schools of education. Many classrooms in the state, especially in low-income areas, are staffed by teachers holding emergency credentials, meaning that they haven’t completed such a training program. A recent report by the Oregon-based Cascade Institute, however, throws into question the supposed connection between teaching credentials and student achievement.

The report quotes Sam Peavey, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois school of education, who says that after 50 years of research, there is no significant correlation between teaching-credential requirements and the quality of student performance. The report also cites insightful data on home-schooled children. In a basic battery of tests, students taught at home by mothers who had never finished high school score 55 percentile points higher than public school students from families with similar educational backgrounds.

There is also evidence here in California that high student achievement does not depend on whether a teacher has a regular credential or not. In the city of Inglewood in southern California, students at five elementary schools have posted very high test scores. Most of these students are either African American or Hispanic and come from low-income backgrounds. These children have been able to perform well even though each of these schools has a large percentage of emergency-credentialed teachers on staff. The principals at these schools say that a regular teaching credential isn’t the key to the achievement of their students. What matters is having a rigorous curriculum, especially in reading and math, that concentrates on basic skills and knowledge and which is highly scripted so that teachers know exactly what to teach to the children. With such a curriculum, any intelligent person, holding a full credential or not, can teach well and obtain good results.

What all this shows is that if we want to improve quality of teaching in California, policymakers should concentrate on curriculum and teaching methods, not on the paper credential of the teacher.

With a perspective, I’m Lance Izumi.

Lance Izumi is the Director of Center for School Reform at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. He can be reached via email at lizumi@pacificresearch.org.