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Crackdowns on Emergency Licenses Begin as Teacher Shortages Loom

By this coming fall, New York has decreed, the worst-performing schools in the state won't be allowed to employ any new teachers with temporary licenses. And by September 2003, the practice will be outlawed altogether.

New York is among a handful of states attempting to crack down on the hiring of teachers without full qualifications. The long-standing practice--known by a variety of terms, including emergency licensure--is used to fill classrooms when teachers trained to teach a particular subject can't be found, or when teacher-candidates haven't passed a required test or finished their coursework.

Now, as districts face the need to hire more than 2 million new teachers over the next decade, critics of emergency licensure fear it will spark a resurgence to stock classrooms with minimally qualified "warm bodies." The concern is more acute in urban and rural schools serving...