Should States Reduce Teacher Licensing Requirements?

Our research examines the overall effects of a policy change in Texas that significantly reduced teacher training requirements. Faced with teacher shortages, Texas enacted policies in 1999 and 2001 that encouraged flexibility in the approval of educator preparation programs (EPPs) and eliminated the requirement that programs include student teaching. Under these new guidelines, for-profit companies entered the EPP market in 2001 and grew to be the dominant provider of teacher training: As of 2020, more than half of all newly certified teachers in Texas completed for-profit EPPs. For-profit programs tend to be cheaper and much shorter in duration than standard and alternative EPPs, which are typically affiliated with universities, and can have most of their programming provided through videos or online courses. For-profit EPPs are frequently criticized by education researchers and the media for lax admission standards and low-quality training, leading Texas to place some for-profit programs on probation. Despite these concerns and a lack of evidence on the overall effectiveness of for-profit EPPs, 10 states had followed Texas’s lead in approving for-profit teacher training programs as of 2019.

Our research uses data on all teacher certifications, public school teachers, and public school students in Texas from 1996 to 2019. Our findings reveal that the reduction in teacher training requirements significantly increased the number of certified teachers and reduced schools’ reliance on uncertified teachers. The annual number of newly certified teachers roughly doubled in the seven years following the emergence of for-profit EPPs in 2001. Moreover, the policy increased the number of certified teachers per resident by roughly 40 percent relative to other states through 2019. Additionally, the policy did not affect the number of employed teachers or average wages—consistent with evidence that teaching vacancies rarely go unfilled—but the policy sharply reduced the share of teachers who were uncertified. Furthermore, teachers who completed for-profit EPPs were more diverse than standard-trained teachers as measured by gender, race, and college major, suggesting that the lower-cost training routes brought new types of certified teachers into the profession.

Next, our research finds that teachers from for-profit EPPs were of lower quality than standard-trained teachers as measured by turnover rates and value-added, but they were significantly better on both metrics than uncertified teachers. A teacher’s value-added is the average increase in their students’ standardized test scores after accounting for students’ observable characteristics, such as prior test scores. For-profit-trained teachers were 10 percentage points more likely to leave the profession within five years, and their value-added on math and English language arts tests was 0.01–0.03 standard deviations lower than standard-trained teachers. However, teachers who began their careers without any certification had much higher turnover rates than for-profit-trained teachers, and their value-added was up to 0.1 standard deviations lower in math than standard-trained teachers.

Our final analysis examines the overall effect of Texas’s policy on student achievement by comparing middle schools with elementary schools, as for-profit-trained teachers were disproportionately likely to earn certificates for higher grade levels. We also compared schools in counties with for-profit EPP headquarters with schools in other counties. Although most for-profit EPPs offered online training, schools near a for-profit EPP were exposed to more for-profit-trained teachers because of in-person training requirements and increased advertising near headquarters. Finally, we compared schools that had vacancies created by the departure of experienced teachers and greater access to for-profit-trained applicants with otherwise similar schools that had less access to these applicants. Each of these comparisons reveals that the reduction in teacher training requirements did not affect student achievement. Schools became more likely to hire for-profit-trained teachers to fill vacancies and less likely to rely on uncertified teachers. Our calculations suggest that the influx of teachers with lower value-added from for-profit EPPs was offset by the reduction in uncertified teachers with even lower value-added.

Taken together, our findings show that Texas’s EPP reform benefited teachers by reducing the burden of training without harming the quality of education for students. Since our research finds no effects of reduced training requirements on total employment or average wages, the main effect of the policy for teachers was to reduce the time and cost of training—a fact that we confirmed with data on EPP programming and pricing. Coupled with the null results on student achievement, our findings suggest that the reduction in teacher training requirements was a net positive for public education in Texas.

Note:
This research brief is based on Christa Deneault and Evan Riehl, “Should States Reduce Teacher Licensing Requirements? Evidence from the Rise of For-Profit Training Programs in Texas,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 34232, September 2025.