Teaching is a calling, but it's also a profession. Most teachers begin their career by earning a credential that authorizes them to teach.

This lesson explains how teachers in California are recruited, prepared and certified, not necessarily in that order. It also addresses criticisms of the certification system.

Supply and demand for teachers

School districts and charter schools hire teachers when they have open positions and budget available to fill them. Demand can vary based on local conditions, but the condition of the state budget matters a lot. When the economy booms, tax receipts rise, the state budget expands, and funds flow to school districts. Job openings suddenly blossom on EdJoin like California poppies in spring.

Most teachers earn their credentials at a college.

Inevitably, at these times there's a gap between the demand for teachers and the supply of candidates with the required credentials. For districts with a reputation for good working conditions and competitive pay, this is an opportunity — they can attract their choice of new teachers, even recruiting star teachers away from other schools to fill openings. Schools with less enticing working conditions, on the other hand, struggle to fill openings. In boom conditions, they may resort to expedited hiring using emergency credentials.

Boom-bust hiring patterns can have a significant impact on schools in high-poverty communities. When teachers leave "difficult" schools to take open positions elsewhere, it's easiest to fill the resulting open position with a new teacher, often without a full credential. This boom-bust hiring pattern, sometimes known as churn, can have a particularly significant impact on schools in high-poverty communities. (This challenge will be explored further in Lesson 3.4.)

Most teaching credentials are earned in programs offered by colleges or universities. The California State University system (CSU) is particularly crucial to California's supply of teachers.

How are most teachers certified?

The Federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) established the expectation that all teachers should be highly qualified. This expectation persists in federal law today, and it influences the widespread use of certification programs. Most teachers earn their credential as part of a college program. If course scheduling goes perfectly, it can take four years, but five years is typical. The Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), oversees the requirements, guided by legislation. Rules change from time to time — for example, in 2021, legislation directed the CTC to modify its reading standards to reflect evidence about how children learn to read, drawing on research about how to effectively teach kids with dyslexia. It takes time for policy changes to find their way to implementation in the classroom.

Teacher credentials come in many flavors, meant to reflect readiness to teach particular grade levels and subject areas. Specific credentials designate that teachers are prepared to teach particular student populations such as English learners and students with disabilities. California law requires districts to verify the credential status of the teachers they employ.

Once a college or other institution is accredited to issue teaching credentials, it is responsible for quality control related to student admissions, course content, rigor, and candidate assessment. In principal, institutions that lack rigor or do a bad job can lose their accreditation status.

Alternative paths to a credential

In addition to colleges, teachers may earn credentials through alternative credential providers. For example, a few large school districts run their own certification programs in order to promote talented people working as teacher aides or substitutes into full teaching roles.

Having a strong pool of teaching candidates is a persistent concern in California. California's Commission for Teacher Credentialing reports annually to the California legislature about the future supply of teacher candidates, based on enrollments in teacher preparation programs. The training pipeline ran dry in 2013, perhaps largely because candidates understood the job market. Why would they enroll to become a teacher if attractive teaching jobs weren't going to be there at the end of the program?

When schools need teachers and districts have funds to hire them, they don’t sit around and wait. If fully-credentialed teachers aren't available, school districts resort to using emergency credentials. This is legal as long as the candidate can meet standards set by the state board. The Learning Policy Institute keeps an eye out for looming teacher shortages across the USA.

California collects prompt and accurate data about the future "supply" of teachers — a rare success story when it comes to education data in this state.

In 2022, EdSource released a district-by-district analysis of available data related to teacher shortages. The headline finding: “While 83% of K-12 classes in the 2020-21 school year were taught by teachers credentialed to teach that course, 17% were taught by teachers who were not.”

Are teachers in your district fully certified? An interactive map from the Learning Policy Center is worth a look — when updated, it makes the conditions clear.

Are teacher shortages overblown?

Some have argued that California has a habit of crying wolf about teacher shortages. There may be a shortage of teachers willing to work in certain districts, or in specific subjects — especially special education, math, and science — but not (they argue) across the board.

There is some truth to this argument, but it kind of misses the point. From the perspective of students, it would certainly be better for there to be a surplus of qualified, motivated teachers eager and proud to teach in California schools. It's better to have a choice of candidates.

Faster certification options

Because the main paths for certifying teachers are fairly complex, they serve as an obstacle to recruiting people into the teaching profession.

Not all teacher preparation programs are equally lengthy, though. For example, the training program of Teach for America (TFA), which selectively recruits new teachers, is famously short: in contrast to the usual one- or two-year series of courses required by education schools, the TFA program lasts just a few months. A number of studies, though not all, indicate that Teach for America's elite rookies perform as well as and sometimes better than graduates of longer programs, particularly for middle and high school math.

Can districts certify their own teachers?

Communities want teachers who understand their children, including the strengths, challenges, and cultures that they bring with them to school. Some districts have addressed this demand by developing a grow your own strategy, helping students advance from local community colleges to become locally-credentialed teachers. The California State University system is working to support the development of teachers with a sense of place as part of their Pathways to Teaching and Education Careers effort.

Should teacher credentials matter so much?

Do credentials really matter? Should they? Oversimplifying greatly, there are two schools of thought about them: less is more, and more is more.

More is more. Some argue that credentials should be hard to get and narrowly defined, to protect children from unqualified teachers. This point of view was generally ascendant in the first decade of the 21^st century, partly driven by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requirement that every teacher must be certified as highly qualified. It takes several years to obtain a teaching credential through normal channels, and candidates must pass multiple tests as part of the process.

Less is more. The "less is more" perspective argues that complex credential requirements do more harm than good by deterring good people from entering the teaching profession or changing course assignments to teach where they are needed. In this view, detailed credential requirements waste time, protect incumbent teachers from competition, and impose bureaucratic barriers on principals' ability to manage their school.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, these recurring questions came back to prominence, particularly in connection to two standardized tests, CBEST and CSET, which teacher candidates are required to pass. Most find the tests depressingly easy and pass them on the first try. Others don't, but argue that the tests are irrelevant to the job. Governor Newsom proposed to waive the tests for teacher candidates that earn good marks in university-based prep programs. As of this writing in 2023, the matter is very much in play. Follow EdSource for news about developments. (Here's a sample of questions on the CBEST math test. What do you think?)

How useful are teacher credential programs?

It's pretty difficult to find people who are enthusiastic about the way that teachers are prepared in California. In 2013, the National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) evaluated teacher preparation programs in each state. California was graded a D, up from a D- the prior year. The Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (yes, there really is an association for everything in education) collected objections to the low grade. In 2014, a scathing report by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education concluded that many teacher preparation programs "lack rigor".

Partly in response to this public shaming, California's CTC convened a high-profile advisory panel in 2013, which generated a thick report with forty recommendations for change. EdSource slimmed its advice down to seven recommendations. But since the report, the state of California has mainly been consumed by addressing the chronic shortage of teachers rather than examining the quality of their preparation. Maybe the programs have improved, but who can tell? The state of California stopped providing data to NCTQ for evaluation.

This lesson was updated in October, 2023