A skills test required of most prospective teachers would disappear, under a recommendation from the State Board of Education on Thursday.
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.
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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.
Prospective and active teachers must already meet a number of other requirements, supports of the board’s recommendation said.
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.
“It’s important that we maintain the highest of standards when it comes to ensuring the highest quality, the most competent level of future teacher to place in our classrooms,” Oxendine said.
Only college students entering educator preparation programs have to take the tests, which are currently the Praxis Core exams. People who seek to become teachers without an education degree — the fastest-growing type of prospective teacher that now makes up more than a third of new teachers — don’t have to take the exams.
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.
Each year, hundreds of college students who want to become teachers fail to pass the exams, which measure reading, writing and math skills.
During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the state waived the exam requirement while test administration was disrupted.
That waiver correlated with about 1,000 more teaching candidates enrolled in teacher preparation programs, DPI data show. The year after the waiver, the number of teaching candidates enrolled dropped by about 1,600 people.
Teachers are already required to have 2.7 grade-point averages and must show competency in several areas before graduating college. Teachers colleges are held accountable for their students’ outcomes. If Praxis Core were removed as a requirement to enter an educator preparation program, educators still must, in most cases, pass a licensure exam in their subject areas once they begin teaching.
The State Board of Education also approved a few other changes affecting educator preparation and licensure. The board recommended clarifying that prospective teachers must have a minimum GPA of 2.7 in at least 18 credit hours of courses relevant to their area of licensure. Currently, colleges can choose whether to require that or a 2.7 GPA for their entire portfolio of college classes. But a policy must be written before it can go into effect, and officials plan to consider a timeline for implementation that would exempt existing students from being affected by a change.
Officials will also develop a portfolio-based assessment for evaluating applicants for principalships, as an alternative to a test.