Teacher Credentials - What Does it All Mean for Policy Advocates

I was really drawn to this week's NYTimes article concerning teacher credentials. It raised an important question in my mind from an advocacy perspective: Should education advocates push for policies the incentivize (or require) teacher credentialing?

I am not an educator. However, I am an advocate and I am interested in pushing for policies that will have the greatest - both in size and quality - impact on low-income children. So I want to know whether there is a real link between credentials and students' achievements.

Personally, I do see some value in requiring teachers to obtain certain credentials as a mark of their having obtained a certain set of information, and achieved a certain level of expertise in their field. I believe that the children being failed the most by our education system - poor children and children of color - will benefit from teachers who can demonstrate that they have been challenged academically, that they are well-grounded in both the theory and practice of education, and who have developed a capacity for critical inquiry and problem solving.

The current dismal state of public education in this country - the increasing number of disconnected youth who are neither in school not in the workforce in record numbers; entire school districts being taken over due to consistent failure - highlights the need for innovative thinkers and the highest quality educators. One of the mechanisms that our society has agreed upon as a way to gauge the quality of one's education, and of one's ability to think critically and creatively, is the academic credential.

Another point is that the increased professionalization of a field increases both the quality of the pool of people who want in to the field at the front end, and the compensation and support for those professionals in the field on the back in. Both of these also strike me as good things for education in this country.

But what do the number say? It turns out that credentials may not be as irrelevant as some educators argue: An study by the Urban Institute found that teacher credentials affect student achievement in systematic ways and that the magnitudes are large enough to be policy relevant.

So, if there is a positive relationship between credentials and student achievement what policy levers can and should be used to increase teacher credentialing?