It’s an every-five-year nuisance, many teachers say. Not exactly arduous, but an administrative pain and not necessarily productive in the service of becoming a better teacher.
It’s also an education topic that we here at Ed Week, along with the rest of the education-publishing field, have widely overlooked. Until now.
A team of reporters here who cover teachers and curriculum have spent the last several months digging into this complicated, messy, and ill-understood policy landscape of teacher license renewal. We looked into questions like:
- Where do teachers tend to get the training they need to re-up their licenses? And who is regulating these providers?
- What are some of the more creative ways states are dealing with relicensure?
- Do National Board-certified teachers get a pass on state license renewal? How well do the two processes for certification align?
- Could microcredentials—or allowing teachers to earn badges by showing they’ve mastered small components of instruction—offer a beneficial path forward for relicensure?
We also looked into the pros and cons of lifetime licenses and collected stories from teachers about their good and bad recertification experiences.
We hope you’ll take some time with the full report, and let us know your thoughts in the comment section below and on individual stories. You can also tweet us your feedback using #BeyondRedTape.