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 educators in California are prepared and certified to work in the classroom, 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 money available to fill them. Demand can vary based on local conditions, but 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 blossom on EdJoin like California poppies in spring.

Most teachers earn their credentials at a college.

Inevitably, at these times there's a teacher shortage. Districts struggle to find good candidates with the required credentials. To fill their classrooms, they might recruit teachers away from other schools if they can. If not, they might resort to expedited hiring using emergency credentials.

When a boom ends, the conditions reverse. The state budget contracts, and school district budgets freeze. Listings on EdJoin dry up. If the downturn is severe, districts may have to let teachers go, usually on the basis of seniority which we discuss in Ed100 Lesson 3.10. This boom-bust hiring pattern, sometimes known as churn, can have a particularly significant impact on schools in high-poverty communities. (The challenges of teacher placement will be explored further in Ed100 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. When overall market demand for teachers changes, either upward or downward, it has a big impact on the colleges and programs that prepare teacher candidates for certification. For these institutions, cyclical demand is a constant source of frustration.

How are most teachers certified?

The Federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) established the expectation that all teachers should be highly qualified in an official way. This expectation persists in law today, and it influences the widespread use of certification programs, partly as a form of evidence.

Most teachers earn their credential as part of a college program. While it’s possible to finish in four years with perfect scheduling, most students take five. The state 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.

Credentials come in many flavors, meant to reflect each educator's readiness to teach particular grade levels and subject areas. For example, specific credentials signal that teachers are prepared to teach English learners or students with disabilities. California law requires districts to verify the credential status of the teachers they employ. Credentials must be renewed every five years with a little paperwork.

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 principle, 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 obtain credentials through alternative credential providers. For example, a few large school districts run their own certification programs, which enables them to efficiently promote talented teacher aides and 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.

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, districts resort to accepting emergency credentials. This is legal as long as the candidate can meet standards set by the State Board of Education. The Learning Policy Institute keeps an eye out for looming teacher shortages across the USA.

To spur the development of teacher preparation programs and meet federal requirements, California collects data about the future "supply" of teachers — a rare success story when it comes to education data in this state. Even so, California schools are chronically short of candidates.

Teacher shortages can feel like an abstract topic, so it helps to think about what actually happens. When a kid is stuck in a classroom without a prepared adult, time passes and money is spent, but learning doesn’t happen. Teacher shortages need to be understood as a very expensive form of waste. How expensive? Learn more about it in Ed100 lesson 4.3, which explains how to put a dollar value on wasted school time.

In 2022, EdSource released a district-by-district analysis of available data related to teacher shortages. The conclusion: “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.” A 2021 study by AACT reached a similar conclusion.

Are teachers in your district fully certified? It can be hard to know. An interactive map from the Learning Policy Center is worth checking — when updated, it makes the conditions clear. (As of this writing in 2025 it was badly out of date.)

Should teacher credentials matter so much?

Do credentials really matter? 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 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.

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, the "less is more" perspective became came back to prominence with the elimination of two standardized tests, CBEST and CSET, which until 2021 teacher candidates were required to pass. (Most found the tests depressingly easy and passed them on the first try. Here are sample questions from the CBEST math test. What do you think?)

As part of the licensing process, California teacher candidates must pass a review known as the Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA). In 2024, “less is more” advocates pushed legislation to eliminate this requirement, too — it’s notorious as a paperwork-intensive exercise, and many teachers resent it. As of 2025, a workgroup (RDI-TPA) has been formed to study the matter and recommend improvements.

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. A teacher labor market that lacks a standing surplus might be theoretically efficient, but it would always leave the hard-to-staff schools short of talent.

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.

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. The state has long been more fixated on finding enough teacher candidates than on making sure they are good.

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 piled on, concluding that many teacher preparation programs "lack rigor".

Did the public shaming help? Probably not. After the bad grade, the state of California stopped providing data to NCTQ for comparison. 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 challenges. As of 2025 it's difficult to argue that any of them have been met.

When an underprepared teacher lands their first job, it doesn't always go well. An awful lot of them quit. The next lesson examines what schools can do to support teachers so that they stay and succeed.

This lesson was updated in January 2025.