In a Teacher Shortage, Are Praxis Exams One Barrier Too Many?
Districts are looking to recruit new teachers from within the community. But aspiring teachers often need help passing the licensing exams known as Praxis.
Warning Bell is a new newsletter focused on the incredible stress being put on the teaching profession, and on teachers themselves. My name is Stephen Noonoo—I’m a longtime education journalist and editor for Edutopia, EdSurge, THE Journal and elsewhere.
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Welcome back from summer break. There’s lots of great stuff in store this year from Warning Bell.
LaQuisha Bonner has had an unconventional path to the classroom to say the least. After earning a law degree, and considering a career in that field, she spent a few years in the South Carolina state government, working for both its Medicaid program and the Department of Employment and Workforce.
Quickly, she realized the best part of her job was when she got to teach others how to successfully navigate the byzantine labyrinth that is so often local government. That led to years of trying to transfer into dedicated trainer positions with no luck. Then she realized there was a government job that would let her impart knowledge and help others full time—public school teacher.
Bonner had some experience teaching grade school as an undergrad, so she thought the process would be relatively straightforward. And it mostly was. In December 2020, she began South Carolina’s Program of Alternative Certification for Educators, known as PACE, which provides a path to the classroom for those with degrees who hadn’t gone down the traditional college of education route.
Perhaps due to the growing teacher shortage—there are nearly 1,500 current teacher vacancies in the state, per new data—the PACE program is not particularly onerous, requiring a handful of graduate level courses in education and the odd certification in areas like reading.
But it does require candidates to pass a Praxis exam, a licensure test used in 46 states that measures subject-specific knowledge. Last year, Bonner took and passed a secondary exam in history, but then had to pass yet another exam.
The district that hired her, Cherokee County School District, in the north of the state and located between Spartanburg and Charlotte, N.C., offered her a middle school position, meaning Bonner had to take the middle school Praxis as well. That, she recalls, was a tall order.
“When I took the first Praxis, it was kind of simple—it wasn’t too much out of my wheelhouse, because I wasn’t long removed from U.S. history in law school,” Bonner says. But it had been years since she had taken middle school history and geography courses.
Studying sounded expensive, too, and she was under a time crunch to pass the exam before the school year started. Luckily, she was connected with an initiative called Keys to the Classroom from the studying resource site Study.com that provided her with free, targeted study materials that helped her pass.
The program forms a small part of the “grow your own” movement, which seeks to recruit new teachers from the local community—turning those who plan to live and work in their local communities into quality teachers. (The Hechinger Report recently did a great profile of some of these programs.)
As Keys to the Classroom notes, alternative pathways are a great resource for helping teachers from underrepresented backgrounds—like teachers of color—but Praxis exams are too often a barrier to entry. The tests are time consuming, especially when candidates are working other jobs, and expensive to study for. The pass rates aren’t great either. As of 2019, more than half of all applicants for the elementary exam were failing their first attempt—with Black and Hispanic test takers facing even greater hurdles and slimmer odds.
Of course, Praxis exams have long sold themselves as a way to make sure only quality teachers were getting in front of classrooms. That’s not always the case though.
A few years ago, in a story about a celebrated Black teacher who was in danger of losing her teaching license over difficulties in passing a Praxis-like math exam, Chalkbeat reported that “research has generally shown a positive but modest link between someone’s scores on standardized exams and their effectiveness as a teacher — but these exams may be less predictive for teachers of color.” In its own survey of over 4,000 teacher candidates in “grow your own” programs, Study.com found that 72 percent of aspiring teachers passed when given access to additional test prep materials, and both Black and Latino test takers passed at higher rates too.
We are currently in the midst of a teacher shortage, with roughly 30,000 nationwide teacher vacancies. Understandably, ETS, the nonprofit test makers behind the Praxis, know an overhaul is long overdue. Pass/fail isn’t a metric that works well for anyone. ETS is now in the early stages of redesigning the test to be more responsive and supportive for candidates, according to EdWeek Market Brief. Social-emotional skills and classroom management may also feature more heavily in whatever ETS cooks up in the future.
Bonner is now starting her second year as a full time teacher at an alternative school, teaching history, civics, and even life skills to kids in grades 6 to 8. In speaking with her, she sounds like a terrific educator who made the right call for her career. Already, she’s connected with supportive administrators and mentors, and encourages anyone with an interest in teaching to pursue the field.
Fortunately for Bonner and her students, she had ready access to great resources, targeted supports, and encouraging school leaders. Too often this winning formula is missing, and great potential educators are left to fall through the cracks.
Best of all, Bonner was able to leverage her law degree to come in at a higher starting salary—though that was less of a motivating factor. “For me, it’s not something I’m doing essentially for a paycheck,” she says. “I could have gone into law and been making big money, but this is where my passion is.”
👁👄👁 Show & Tell
📚 Independent Reading
New York Times: “A teacher in an Atlanta suburb has been fired for reading a book to fifth-grade students that explores gender roles and identity through the eyes of a child who describes their shadow as purple, her lawyer said on Friday.” I don’t even have the words. Her lawyers are considering their options, for what it’s worth.
Related: The NEA has a breakdown of all the forced resignations and culture war drama teachers have been enduring lately.
Houston Chronicle: “The Houston Independent School District teachers union is considering legal action against HISD in response to a new district policy limiting what employees can post on social media. Union leaders are pushing back on the policy, saying the measure is meant to ‘silence’ employees.”
Hechinger Report: “You can’t teach psychology without covering gender and sexuality, and you can’t teach history without covering racism.” Florida has relented on its decision to curtail the AP Psychology course in the state, which the College Board was not prepared to do. But Arkansas is still feuding over the AP African American studies course, leading to a virtual ban.
✏️ Revisions
The lead story in last month’s newsletter, Teachers Push Back on Claim They Caused Learning Loss, was updated to reflect that the report was authored by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, using data co-collected by RAND. The original newsletter misstated the report’s origins.