Teacher Certification Requirements -- Racist?

Matthew Ladner points out that teacher certification requirements make almost no difference in teacher performance -- about half of uncertified teachers improve their students' learning, and about half of certified teachers have students who get worse. Ladner then points to an Education Next piece arguing that on a nationwide basis, states that allow alternative certification are more likely to allow minorities into the teacher workforce.

To which I'd add: Dan Goldhaber (one of the nation's most prominent researchers on teacher qualifications) and Michael Hansen have a recent article making the same point in a more rigorous manner. To quote the abstract:

[U]sing a dataset of public school teachers and their students in North Carolina spanning ten years, we find both black teachers and male teachers have substantively lower performance on these licensure tests but have few differences in classroom performance. . . . This analysis suggests that black students, in particular, benefit from having a black teacher. These positive mentoring effects are benefits that may be lost if the state were to pursue policies that strictly enforce licensure cutoffs.

And to quote from the article itself:

[W]hen teaching black students, black teachers in the lower end of the teacher test distribution are estimated to perform at approximately the same level as white teachers at the upper end of the distribution. High-performing black teachers are estimated to perform higher still, though this difference (among black teachers) is insignificant. . . .

In summary, we find evidence suggesting the uniform application of licensure standards for all teachers is likely to have differential impacts on the achievement of white and minority students. Specifically, we see that the lowest performers among black teachers enjoy the greatest mentoring effects when teaching black students; and, these mentoring effects to black students are comparable to having the highest-performing white teachers in the classroom. Removing the lowest of performers on the exam would necessarily remove some of the more-effective teachers for this segment of the student population.