The number of Philly teachers without full certification has more than doubled. It comes at a cost

Amid a national educator shortage, the number of Philadelphia School District teachers hired who lack full certification has surged.

Nine years ago, 9.2% of Philadelphia teachers held emergency certification.

In the 2022-23 school year, the last year for which state data are available, that percentage more than doubled, to 22.4%. That means one in five Philadelphia students is being taught by an educator who lacks full certification, according to an analysis by Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Education Policy Analysis.

While the practice of hiring teachers with what is called “emergency certification” allows the district to staff more classrooms amid a national teacher shortage, it comes at a cost to students, teachers, and the district.

Most of those emergency-certified teachers don’t manage to earn on time the credentials that allow them to remain in a public school long-term — only an average of 17% of Philadelphia’s emergency-certified teachers become fully certified each year, district officials said. Teachers can renew their emergency credentials for a time, but not indefinitely, and without meeting education or testing requirements, they eventually lose their jobs — meaning high turnover and loss of investment made in those teachers.

And emergency-prepared teachers — who may have no training in classroom management or pedagogy — often struggle, said Linda Darling-Hammond, an expert in education research and teacher quality and professor emeritus at Stanford University.

“We know that those teachers who have really very little prep, if any, are less effective and they leave at higher rates, and that creates a vicious cycle of churn,” said Darling-Hammond, who has conducted research on emergency certified teachers. “It drives down achievement, and it makes it tough to do school improvement because as fast as you try to help people focus on trying to get better, they leave.”

Students of color and students from economically disadvantaged homes typically get higher percentages of emergency-prepared teachers, said Ed Fuller, the Penn State education professor who analyzed the certification data.

That’s true in this area: While the numbers of emergency-certified teachers have grown in the collar counties as well, they are nowhere near Philadelphia’s figures. Only 2.6% of the total teaching force in Bucks County was emergency-certified in 2022-23, 2% in Chester County, 5% in Delaware County, and 3.3% in Montgomery County.

“The kids who need the best teachers often aren’t getting them — they’re getting emergency-certified teachers,” Fuller said. “People don’t want to work at those schools, and they take whoever they can get.”

The challenge of finding teachers

Pennsylvania issues emergency certificates when districts can’t find “a fully qualified and properly certified educator holding a valid and active certificate,” according to the state Department of Education.

So, in some ways, the high number of emergency-certified teachers is no surprise. The demand for teachers far outstrips the supply, nationally and in Philadelphia. The district, the nation’s eighth-largest, began this school year with about 350 unfilled teaching jobs.

Fewer students are majoring in education; in 2021-22, Pennsylvania issued its lowest-ever number of new teaching licenses, 5,101, down from about 16,000 in 2012-13. And for the first time ever, Pennsylvania in 2021-22 issued more emergency-teaching certificates than it did full certificates.

Emergency-certified teachers must hold a bachelor’s degree — an exception is made for career and technical education teachers — and they are obligated to either enroll in a teacher certification program or pass exams while they teach full-time. They have until the end of the school year to finish their coursework or pass the exams.

That Philadelphia converts just 17% of its emergency-certified teachers to full certification was disheartening to Laura Boyce, executive director of Teach Plus Pennsylvania, a teacher advocacy group.

“It’s not a very effective way of creating long-term teachers if so few are actually progressing through the certification process to receive instructional certificates,” Boyce said. “They are being thrown into a very challenging profession with no opportunities beforehand to be prepared. We’re clearly bringing them in in a way that clearly enough supports aren’t there.”

The benefits and challenges of emergency-certified teachers

When the Philadelphia school board heard recently that fewer than one-third of the district’s high school students were able to pass state Keystone algebra exams by 11th grade — and that the number slipped from the prior year — they wanted to know why.

“We do not have adequate or enough certified math teachers — through no fault of their own — who’ve had the benefit of a four-year college of education experience to learn both the math content and the math pedagogy,” Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. told them.

The district is well aware of the challenges, but it also values the hiring option and the qualities those teachers bring, officials said.

Kaylan Connally, the Philadelphia district’s chief talent officer, called emergency-certified educators an “important source of new teachers” that “really strengthen the diversity of our educator workforce.” (High numbers of emergency-prepared teachers are educators of color, a priority in a district where there’s a significant disparity between the demographics of the student body and the teaching force.)

Three years ago, Philadelphia’s number of emergency-certified teachers began to grow so high that the district needed to adjust its professional development, said Michael Farrell, its deputy chief of professional learning.

“Sometimes it’s not about piling on more and more support, but about what type of support,” Farrell said.

The district’s new hire orientation now has a dedicated pathway for those teachers coming in on emergency certificates without any prior teaching experience; it has also built in differentiated professional development, in addition to the coaching all new teachers receive.

While they need support that traditionally prepared teachers do not, Farrell said, the district values emergency-certified teachers.

“There’s a hunger and excitement about them wanting to teach and choosing this, and it’s important for us to capitalize on that,” said Farrell.

‘You’ll figure it out, or not’

Years ago, Fatim Byrd became a teacher at a Philadelphia charter. Byrd had initially thought he wanted to become a psychologist but ultimately found the prospect of post-undergraduate schooling too expensive.

“It was easier to get access to becoming a teacher vs. going through years and years of school and counseling hours,” said Byrd, who had studied abroad during college and loved the idea of teaching Spanish in Philadelphia, where he had attended Simon Gratz High School and Temple University.

Two years into teaching at Hill-Freedman World Academy, a Philadelphia School District school, the Pennsylvania Education Department determined his teaching experience and undergraduate degree weren’t enough to qualify for full certification.

He had to enroll in a university immediately to earn his certification, then apply for a job at another district school.

“It ended up costing me an extra $20,000, and I don’t know how I’m going to pay this stuff back,” said Byrd, who now teaches at Strawberry Mansion High School. He worries about loan forgiveness programs possibly disappearing in another Donald Trump administration, he said, to the point where he wonders if he should even continue teaching.

“I probably wouldn’t have had a lot of the opportunities I had because of the teacher shortage, and that’s a good thing, but there’s been negative impact, too,” said Byrd. “There’s so much about getting certified that I didn’t know. It’s been hard.”

Andrew Saltz, now an English and technology teacher at Paul Robeson High School in West Philadelphia, has settled into the profession, but said his emergency certificate path was rough.

“I’m glad I went through it, but I don’t think it was very good for anyone,” Saltz said. “There’s no other profession where we would send people in untrained and say, ‘You’ll figure it out, or not.’”

Saltz was 23 when he started teaching English at the former Kensington Business High School. He had worked as a substitute, and that was helpful, “but teaching kids how to read is really hard, especially teaching teenagers. They said, ‘Here’s a curriculum,’ and I said, ‘What do I do with this?’”

He nearly got his emergency certificate revoked, Saltz said, because he stopped taking classes.

“I was sitting in a class with a bunch of 20-year-olds, and I was thinking, ‘I still have papers to grade,’” he said.

But Saltz stuck with it, found mentors, found ways to learn, found a community at Robeson.

“By year three or four, it clicked,” Saltz said. “But it was awful for awhile.”

‘A policy amenable problem’

The good news, said Darling-Hammond, the education expert: “This is a policy amenable problem.”

That is: It’s possible to attract more qualified candidates to the teaching profession by changing teaching conditions.

“Raising salaries matters,” she said. “Teachers in this country are paid about 25% less than other college-educated workers.”

There are other ways, too: Programs that pay college students to study education but bind them to teach in certain districts. Mentoring programs. Offsetting the high costs of certification. Placing the strongest teachers in the highest-need schools. (Watlington, at the board meeting, suggested this will be something he tries to achieve in the next teachers’ contract.)

Boyce likes strategic staffing models — schools that give veteran teachers leadership roles and dedicated time to coach new teachers — and “shelter and protect” models for rookie teachers that give those teachers smaller class sizes or co-teachers.

Emergency-certified teachers solve a problem when principals are faced with a vacant classroom. But it should rarely get to that point, said Darling-Hammond.

“It’s the top of the system that has to be thinking of ways to fix this,” she said.

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