North Carolina's Department of Education is recommending dropping entry exam requirements for prospective teachers, as a means of addressing the state's teacher shortage.
Board members made the recommendation Thursday, in the hopes that removing the test requirement would result in more people entering the teaching profession as teacher turnover hits new highs. That was after officials with the state Department of Public Instruction said passage of the test wasn’t correlated with higher quality teaching metrics.
The board adopted the cancellation of this test at the state’s public teacher colleges as a part of its legislative agenda, meaning lawmakers would have to ultimately agree to it. While the board voted 8-3 to make the recommendation, its three Republican members voted against it, including Lt. Gov Mark Robinson and Treasurer Dale Folwell. The General Assembly has a Republican supermajority. Last year, lawmakers decided to make subject-area licensure exams — different from the skills test required in college — optional in certain cases for active teachers with limited licenses.
During a board meeting last month, adviser and former state Teacher of the Year Leah Carper noted that charter school teachers don’t have to be licensed at all — only traditional public school teachers do. She said a large percentage of current teachers — including the 2023 Teacher of the Year Kim Jones — never took the test because they didn’t major in education.
“There is absolutely no correlation between an excellent educator and someone who passes that test,” Carper said.
Board Member Olivia Oxendine, who voted against the measure, said she understood that teachers are assessed in multiple ways annually once they become teachers. But she said she still believed exams while teaching candidates are still college students are essential to ensuring the best people are graduating from the state’s teacher colleges.
The skills test is required by state law as a way of filtering out teaching candidates thought to be less prepared for the profession. But North Carolina Department of Public Instruction leaders compared teachers who passed the exam to teachers who didn’t have to take it and found no ultimate difference in performance once they took the helm of classrooms. They were just as likely as one another to satisfy their supervisors, perform well on evaluations and meet or exceed test score growth expectations, according to the department.
I'm not from North Carolina, but I've heard the teacher shortage is quite profound there. What are your thoughts?