Every state requires public school teachers to be “certified,” and most of that certification runs through a university school of education. New research by TPPF’s Kate Bierly asks a simple question: is that credential actually worth anything? The answer, backed by decades of data, is no.
Teacher training used to happen in “normal schools.” The practical, two-year programs simply reviewed the subjects teachers would go on to teach. Above all, students would be taught to read, write, and do math.
But once teacher prep moved into research universities in the early 1900s, education schools reinvented themselves around Progressive-era theories that prized “child-centered” experience over subject mastery. Later, critical theory and DEI frameworks pushed things further, turning many teacher-prep programs into training grounds for activism.
The numbers back up the unsurprising decline in quality. Education majors post some of the lowest GRE scores of any field, even as education schools hand out A’s at higher rates than almost any other department on campus. This grade inflation masks poor preparation.
Reviews covering roughly 150 studies over five decades found no consistent evidence that teachers with formal certification and education degrees produce better student results than uncertified teachers. Secondary math is the only exception. A detailed New York City study using student-level data also found that certified and uncertified teachers performed about the same in the classroom.
Bierly concludes, “The century-long experiment of education schools has utterly failed. Education schools must be dismantled entirely to restore education’s true purpose. There is no viable path to internal reform; the institutions are built on premises antithetical to truth-seeking and intellectual rigor. The solution is a return to the pre-university model that produced a highly literate American public in the 19th century.”
Here’s the bottomline: Teacher quality should be the standard, not teacher credentialing. If certification doesn’t improve student outcomes, it’s hard to justify the time, tuition, and gatekeeping built around it.
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