In the face of looming teacher shortages, hundreds of thousands of uncertified teachers have entered the K-12 teaching ranks in recent years.
School districts in 49 states and Washington, D.C., hired an estimated 365,044 teachers who were not fully certified between the 2021-22 and 2023-24 school years, according to a 2024 analysis by the Learning Policy Institute. Even with that, schools in 30 states plus the District of Columbia reported 41,920 unfilled teacher spots during that period.
For the current school year, districts nationwide hired 400,000 underqualified educators and have at least 49,000 vacant positions, according to a separate project from researchers at the University of Missouri, University of Pittsburgh and elsewhere.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, most states implemented some sort of waiver for teaching certifications given the difficulty of administering tests for aspiring teachers, said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research. What those pandemic-era waivers looked like varied across states, he said.
And while those waivers are generally gone, Goldhaber said, some waived requirements to become a teacher remain. For instance, states like New Jersey have waived certain testing requirements for licensure.
Plus, most states still allow uncertified teachers to continue instructing under the condition that they fulfill certain requirements within a set number of years, Goldhaber said. Yet it seems those states are prolonging the time frame for meeting the extended requirements, he said.
“There’s never been so many teachers who got into the profession at once with waived requirements, and it’s probably a bit of a political problem for states to say, ‘Sorry, there’s this big group of teachers that needs to now go,’” said Goldhaber, who is also director of the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington.
What the research says, so far
How has student achievement been affected by the increase in uncertified teachers? Based on the nascent research in just a few states, it's premature to make sweeping conclusions, Goldhaber said.
Several studies have analyzed the early impacts of pandemic-era teacher licensure waivers on student performance in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Texas.
A Massachusetts study conducted by Boston University’s Wheelock Educational Policy Center showed positive, early signs that teachers with emergency licenses performed as effectively as other newly hired teachers in the state. However, a separate CALDER working paper, which analyzed Massachusetts’ emergency licensed teacher performance between 2021 and 2023, found their students “scored significantly lower on standardized tests in math and science than other students in the same school and same year.”
“It turns out that if you look at later cohorts, they [the teachers] are less effective … and we don’t know exactly why,” Goldhaber said. “This is squarely in the bucket of speculation — one possible reason why the results change across the cohorts is that there could be some sort of sifting in and out of teacher preparation that happens over time.”
Meanwhile, in Texas, 52% of teachers were hired without certification during the 2023-24 school year, according to a 2024 report by the University of Texas at Austin. A separate analysis by Texas Tech University in 2024 found Texas students lost about three months in math instruction and four months in reading with uncertified teachers who had no prior classroom experience, compared to peers with certified teachers.
But Texas is an outlier when it comes to implementing teacher certification waivers, because the state “has the most deregulated teacher preparation landscape in the country,” and it’s faced a chronic teacher shortage over a couple of decades, said study author Jacob Kirksey, an assistant professor and associate director at the Center for Innovative Research in Change, Leadership, and Education at Texas Tech.
Concerns and alternative solutions
Regardless, there’s no right way to go about hiring uncertified teachers, said Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, in an email. State officials, she said, should prohibit practices that allow teachers to be hired without proper certification.
“States face a real challenge in developing their teacher pipelines, but fast-tracking underprepared teachers into the classroom will ultimately cost much more in terms of school budgets, teacher attrition, and students who get sub-par teaching. It’s penny-wise, pound-foolish,” Peske said.
Alternatively, Peske said, states and school district leaders should reimagine the teaching role with a hiring and retention strategy that will improve student outcomes.
This could include, for instance, innovative staffing models where multiple teachers with different skill sets and specialties work as a team to instruct a larger group of students, she said. Or it could mean paying highly effective teachers more or creating teacher leadership roles for mentoring other educators and helping them advance in the profession.
Peske added that teachers are interested in these kinds of strategies. She cited a 2024 survey of 1,000 teachers by Educators For Excellence that found 63% of teachers said they want more time to collaborate with other teachers, and half said they support team-teaching models.
Kirksey said he is hopeful that states, including Texas, adopt strategies that tap into teacher residency programs for aspiring educators, especially those who already have classroom experience from being long-term substitute teachers or paraprofessionals. Under this model, student teachers receive tuition reimbursement or living stipends while earning a teaching degree and teach in a classroom under a veteran educator’s leadership, he said.
Goldhaber agreed that prior classroom experience and current instructional feedback are key for supporting prospective teachers. When student teachers work with effective mentors, they improve on the job, he said. Student teaching is also a good litmus test to help people see if they truly want to pursue a teaching career, he added.
While Goldhaber pointed to benefits from supporting student teaching opportunities, he said there’s not enough evidence yet on whether the teacher apprenticeship model is a successful strategy. That’s partly because it’s still early for the programs, he said, and success is complicated to measure since definitions of teacher apprenticeships vary by locality.
