What Pandemic-Era Waivers Tell Us about Teacher Licensure Tests: Evidence from Five States

Most states require prospective teachers to pass basic skills and subject-matter tests to become licensed. Despite being widely used, the value of licensure testing in public education has long been a subject of debate (Angrist & Guryan, 2004; Goodman et al., 2008). The COVID-19 pandemic created an unexpected opportunity to revisit these competing claims—whether licensure exams uphold standards that improve teaching quality, or risk limiting prospective teacher supply and excluding capable candidates. This brief offers a descriptive account at how pandemic-era emergency licenses helped shape the teacher workforce during the pandemic. 

Key Findings

• New teachers with pandemic-era emergency licenses were generally more racially diverse than recently licensed teachers from other pathways.
• New teachers with pandemic-era emergency licenses were also more likely to work in schools serving Black, Hispanic, and low-income students than recently licensed teachers from other pathways.
• Early in the pandemic, new teachers with pandemic-era emergency licenses performed comparably to recently licensed teachers from other pathways. But in Massachusetts—where emergency waivers were extended past 2022—their performance started to decline in later cohorts.

On balance, these states’ experiences with pandemic-era waivers suggest that loosening licensure can help maintain teacher supply in times of crisis. But on its own, lowering barriers to entry is, at best, an incomplete strategy for diversifying and improving the quality of the teacher workforce.