What Kind of Emergency Hires Do Well at Teaching?

In the face of chronic and escalating teacher shortages, policymakers, parents, and educators are worried about how to improve the supply of effective teachers. New studies that assess the impact of teachers hired on emergency permits in Massachusetts and New Jersey during the COVID-19 pandemic offer important insights about what matters for both effectiveness and retention—the latter of which is especially important, because turnover is the main cause of shortages. Some have interpreted the studies’ findings as suggesting that teachers don’t need traditional preparation to be effective, but a close look shows that the studies largely confirm the value of preparation while also raising important questions about how to remove unnecessary obstacles to entry.

The studies compare the performance of emergency hires with the performance of those who entered classrooms at the same time but had been prepared through traditional pathways or through the two states’ alternative pathways, which allow teachers to complete their preparation while teaching. However, these special hires during the pandemic were not typical emergency hires. Instead, most were candidates who already had some classroom experience or preparation for teaching. In many states, candidates could not take licensing tests or complete student teaching when test sites and school buildings were closed in March 2020—conditions that often continued through the following school year. Many only needed to make up missed coursework or tests before they could receive a standard credential.

In New Jersey, the Temporary Certificate of Eligibility allowed candidates enrolled in preparation programs to enter the workforce and defer tests of basic skills, subject matter, and performance to the following year. In Massachusetts, more than two thirds of the emergency hires included in the study were already in the teacher preparation pipeline and/or had been previously employed in the schools.

Even with some preparation experience, teacher evaluation ratings were significantly lower on average for New Jersey’s temporary licensed hires and for other teachers who took alternative routes than they were for fully prepared beginners. This difference was true for practice scores, gains on student growth objectives, and summative ratings.

In Massachusetts, fully prepared beginners were also the most highly rated group of novices in the state, with more than 90% rated proficient or exemplary. Entrants with some preparation—either through the state’s alternate (provisional) route or emergency hires with some experience or prior preparation—were not rated as well; nonetheless, 84% to 85% of these teachers were rated at least proficient. However, significantly lower ratings were associated with the least prepared entrants (those who had no prior teacher education or experience). Among these teachers, about 1 in 4 received a rating of “unsatisfactory” or “needs improvement,” more than 2.5 times the share of fully prepared novice teachers who received such ratings.

Principals noted that the untrained and inexperienced emergency hires were more likely to be poorly rated on the “curriculum, planning, and assessment” standard—the core work of teaching. These teachers were also most likely to be hired in schools that had larger proportions of students from low-income families and students of color, where, due to longstanding resource inequities, such teaching challenges are more difficult for students to overcome.

Test score gains in math and English language arts (ELA) were lower for emergency hires relative to fully prepared teachers in Massachusetts, but these gains were not generally statistically significant after teacher assignments were controlled (i.e., when teachers were compared only to those within their same schools teaching similar types of students). However, in every comparison, the students taught by emergency hires in Massachusetts who had neither experience nor preparation had significantly lower gains in ELA scores than those taught by fully prepared new teachers.

In New Jersey, test score gains were hard to study because many of the temporary hires had left by the time the state resumed standardized testing and only certain grade levels could be observed, so samples were extremely small (only 58 temporarily licensed teachers). Furthermore, the analyses could not separate out the alternate-route candidates from the traditional-route candidates. Students’ score gains could be measured only for 6th-, 7th-, and 8th-graders in 2022, compared with their scores three years earlier (in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades). As a result, the scores associated with the teachers in question had to be combined with those from the students’ other teachers in the prior 2 years, leaving unclear the contributions of each. The authors of the New Jersey study note that, for these reasons, their results—which found little difference between the students of temporarily licensed teachers and the students of other undifferentiated novices—are “imprecise.”

Also important for future achievement gains is the degree to which new teachers stay in the profession, since teacher attrition impacts student learning in at least two ways. First, teacher effectiveness improves with experience, so policies that produce a large number of inexperienced teachers who do not stay long enough to become effective undermine student learning overall. Second, high rates of teacher turnover negatively impact student learning, particularly for those in the highest-need schools. In addition, turnover is the primary driver of teacher shortages (about 9 of 10 vacancies are caused by teachers who left the year before), which can create a vicious cycle in these schools.

In both Massachusetts and New Jersey, emergency and temporary hires remained in the classroom at lower rates than other novice teachers. According to Massachusetts surveys, this was partly because of the challenges of completing the coursework and testing requirements for a license and partly because principals were less likely to hire some of the candidates. As one Massachusetts principal put it, “Some worked extremely well, and some struggled. It was the hardest year ever.”

In Massachusetts, only about half of teachers who received emergency licenses in 2020 were hired, and of those employed in spring 2021, only about 59% returned as teachers the following fall—about the same percentage as other alternate-route teachers but a lower rate than fully prepared teachers. By June 2023, only one third of the first cohort had transitioned to a provisional or initial license. In New Jersey, only about 73% of temporarily licensed novices were still teaching in the state after their first year, compared with 88% of fully prepared novices.

These outcomes are consistent with other research that has found that teachers who enter with less training are more likely to leave in their first year than those who enter fully prepared and that underprepared teachers who leave at high rates are most common in schools with larger proportions of students of color and students from low-income families.

Both of the studies note that, in part because test score barriers had been removed, the temporary or emergency hires were more racially and ethnically diverse than the new teacher workforce as a whole. This is an important outcome to consider given the growing research base that shows that students of color often experience boosts in achievement and attainment and all students benefit in a variety of ways when they have comparably prepared teachers of color.

And some of these temporary and emergency teachers were working out reasonably well— often about as well as teachers entering through alternative routes, who were also partially prepared before entry and trying to complete their preparation while teaching. In Massachusetts, it was clear that those who had more preparation and experience in schools did noticeably better on average than those who had none. As the authors of the Massachusetts study note, a broader policy on emergency entrants that did not tap those already in the workforce or preparation pipeline—as this one did—would raise even greater concerns.

In both studies, wherever fully prepared new teachers were examined separately, they were found to have performed better and stayed longer in the classroom than emergency or temporary hires and recruits from the two states’ alternative routes. Prior research finds that comprehensive preparation—which includes courses in teaching, learning, curriculum, and assessment, as well as student teaching with an expert mentor teacher who models teaching strategies and provides feedback—is associated with a much greater likelihood of staying in teaching.

The need for well-prepared teachers, especially in classrooms where historically underserved students generally get the least prepared teachers, is long-standing and is made more acute by the needs for extensive learning recovery associated with the pandemic. It is ironic that in the United States, unlike in high-achieving countries such as Singapore and Finland, the conversation about teacher recruitment often revolves around how little preparation we can provide teachers, rather than how we can make it possible for all teachers to be well prepared and for all students to have the benefits of fully prepared teachers.

Two things stand most prominently in the way of producing an adequate supply of well-prepared teachers for all students. One barrier noted in these studies is the proliferation of testing hurdles that many states have placed before potential teachers. It is not uncommon for teachers to face three or four tests before licensure rather than the single exam most professionals encounter en route to a license in their field. A few teacher assessments have been found to be related to teachers’ later effectiveness (e.g., performance assessments such as the National Board Certification, the Performance Assessment for California Teachers [PACT], and edTPA), while many have not. Tests that are unrelated to the tasks of teaching and that produce a large number of “false negatives” pose significant trade-offs to the profession. The New Jersey and Massachusetts experiments demonstrate that reduced reliance on standardized tests can expand supply. To do so while also maintaining teacher quality, a growing number of states have begun to allow teachers to demonstrate basic skills and subject matter competence through coursework performance rather than tests.

The second barrier to improving the teacher supply is the growing cost of preparation, which—unlike other countries—is largely unsubsidized by the government in the United States. Teachers must take on more debt than those in other occupations to enter a profession that pays about 25% less than other fields that require a college education. Teachers of color carry much more debt than White teachers, which propels a large number of teachers of color into alternative routes or emergency pathways where they can earn a salary while they prepare to teach. Unfortunately, those routes are also typically associated with lower effectiveness and significantly higher attrition rates.

What is most needed to smooth pathways into teaching in ways that support success for teachers and students is to rightsize the requirements for teaching to those that are most meaningful while also fully subsidizing preparation for teaching as other countries do. In addition, we can invest in high-quality, high-retention pathways, such as teacher residencies, that recruit, support, and—importantly—retain a diverse, well-prepared teaching force for the highest-need districts that most often experience a revolving door of underprepared beginners. At least 10 states have launched residency models—university and district partnerships that couple financial support for candidates with a full year of clinical training in the classroom of an expert mentor teacher while candidates are completing credentialing coursework. These models have been found to produce a much more diverse cadre of effective teachers who are well prepared to succeed in high-need schools and who stay in teaching at much higher rates than other entrants.

To solve shortages in the long run, we must focus purposefully on strategies for recruiting and preparing teachers who are effective and will stay in the profession. As our students struggle to recover lost learning time, it is critical that we support both them and their teachers with strong learning opportunities that enable success for everyone.

Learning Policy Institute researcher Wesley Wei contributed to this piece.