The desire for good teachers in the classroom is as old as teaching itself. Back in the early 19th century, teacher licenses were first issued to help ensure the quality of teachers and facilitate the rapid expansion of schooling. Before long, schools of education, state education departments, and urban school officials created increasingly bureaucratized licensure systems. Today, every state requires that educators be licensed to teach in the 100,000 public schools that enroll 90 percent of Ameri­can students.

In theory, licensure ensures that teachers can do their job; in practice, it burdens prospective teachers and deters promising candidates without delivering on that core promise. At a time when even the Biden administration has woken up to the costs of runaway licensure rackets, when COVID-related disruptions have created the need for more teachers with an array of skill sets, and when schools struggle with a perpetual “teacher shortage” produced by licensure’s barriers to professional entry, it’s time to give teacher licensure another look.

Let’s start with the overly burdensome process of obtaining a teacher license. Earning a license requires would-be educators to sit through a lengthy set of education courses and then “student teach” under the supervision of education faculty. Undergraduates who by age 18 or 19 know that they’d like to teach can check these boxes by majoring in education. For most anyone else, licensure involves a graduate school of education or an alternative credentialing program.

The cost of this teacher training can deter potential educators. Former Obama-administration official Chad Aldeman has estimated that licensure requirements mean that training the average teacher costs about $25,000 and requires 1,500 hours (more than the typical teacher works in a year). If one considers the earnings that working professionals give up in order to pursue a credential, that cost is higher still.

Yet none of this guarantees that teachers are up to the job. Critics have pointed out that the nation’s 1,250 teacher-preparation programs attract candidates with SAT math scores lower than those of the modal English major and with verbal scores lower than those of the typical math major. The programs are plagued by extraordinary grade inflation, and most make little to no effort to screen for academic performance. Indeed, one must wonder whether costly, less than respected preparation programs dissuade many who might otherwise be inclined to consider a teaching career.

Meanwhile, researchers have found no difference in performance between certified and noncertified teachers. Super­visors also don’t seem to think licenses mean much: The Aspen Institute has found that just 7 percent of superintendents and 13 percent of principals think certification guarantees that a teacher “has what it takes” to be effective in the classroom.

Indeed, preparation programs frequently seem more focused on insisting that would-be teachers embrace an ideological deluge of “anti-racist” and “social justice” dogma. The American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education champions the “integral role educator preparation programs play in advancing scholarly work on Critical Race Theory” and urges them to “resist recent federal attacks.” Accreditation standards for teacher preparation call for candidates to inventory “their personal biases” so as to promote “equity, diversity, and inclusion.” At the nation’s largest teacher-preparation programs, two in five faculty say that their area of study includes equity, race, or diversity — and about a third of these scholars employ a critical-race-theory perspective.

While alternative licensure programs may seem a promising workaround, the vast majority of them are owned and operated by schools of education. The schedule and structure of the programs may look different, but the culture, curriculum, and cost of the training don’t meaningfully change. Even programs such as Teach for America, which is inevitably depicted as an “alternative” route into the profession, typically partner with schools of education to license their teachers.

Proponents of teacher licensure frequently offer analogies to medicine or engineering, arguing that professionals in each field need certain essential knowledge and skills. They have it partly right. Those fields do require licenses. But what they ignore is that licensure in those professions signals only a baseline grasp of the requisite knowledge and skills — not that someone will be a “good” physician or civil engineer. Likewise, teacher licensure is a poor proxy for ensuring that someone will be a good teacher. Perversely, though, even as the ed-school professoriate preaches that good teaching is largely a matter of relationships and emotional intelligence, they defend bureaucratic, rigid licensure systems that just aren’t capable of accounting for these traits.

Ironically, when it does come to those elements of professional knowledge that legitimately qualify as essential, teacher licensure doesn’t deliver. The National Center for Teacher Quality reports, for instance, that only eleven states require their preparation programs to “verify that all teacher candidates planning to teach either elementary school or special education have learned the most effective methods for teaching children how to read.” And just 15 states require teacher candidates to pass a test showing they have the reading, writing, and math skills the job requires.

Licensure in schooling has also given rise to ludicrously narrow, complicated classifications that make it tough to sensibly staff schools. States have created a staggering array of licensure categories organized by subjects, specialties, and grade levels, with teachers approved to teach only in their particular box. This can hinder school leaders seeking to deploy staff in flexible or creative ways — a problem very much on display as schools struggled to deliver remote instruction or provide special education in response to COVID-inspired disruptions.

Ultimately, rather than medicine or engineering, teaching is probably more akin to fields such as journalism or business management, where excellence is largely an alchemy of personal relationships, relevant knowledge, and practical skills. In those fields, formal training can be useful (and offer a leg up) when landing a job, but one needn’t possess a license to pursue employment. Mean­while, it’s the hiring process, not licensure, that allows employers to evaluate whether a candidate has the appropriate disposition and soft skills.

There’s a better path to ensure teacher effectiveness, one that welcomes career-switchers, judges new hires on aptitude rather than credentials, and allows training to be employed when and if it’s useful. In lieu of licensure, states should adopt safeguards that are more precisely targeted, such as rigorous criminal checks, tests in basic subject matter, requirements that K–3 teachers understand the research on early-childhood reading, and so on. If such requirements create a market for targeted, speedy, demonstrably effective training, so much the better.

Ending the licensure paper chase promises to benefit students and teachers alike. School leaders would be free to hire as they see appropriate, adopt more customized training approaches, place new teachers in apprenticeship roles, and use skilled veterans to provide rigorous, applied mentorship. Relieving the bottleneck of ossified ed-school preparation would enable educational leaders to answer the novel demands of hybrid homeschooling, innovative school models, and distance learning. It would similarly help satisfy the appetite for more-accessible, higher-quality career and technical education, by making it easier to find skilled, experienced tradesmen or coders who can teach their skills to others.

Since aspiring teachers would no longer be required to buy a license, fewer educators would enter the profession with onerous debt. Meanwhile, the billions in state and federal funding that are currently diverted to schools of education would be able to flow directly to schools, allowing them to offer substantial pay bumps for talented, seasoned educators who want more actively to coach and mentor new hires — simultaneously promoting a true professionalism by offering more alluring career paths, which, in turn, could help attract and retain talented practitioners.

Such a shift would profoundly alter the competitive environment for the nation’s teacher-preparation programs, which have long operated as cash cows that rake in dollars from a captive audience of would-be teachers. It would weaken the grip of education schools and unions over professional entry, create a more entrepreneurial sector, and strike a blow against teaching’s ideological gatekeepers. Absent the licensure mandate, programs would be forced to demonstrate that their service does equip graduates with useful skills and knowledge. If they do, they’ll still attract students and eager school partners. If they don’t, they’ll need to either improve or close their doors. That seems healthy for all concerned.

Cracking the teacher-licensure cartel would enable school leaders to imagine how they might recruit and best use all available talent, rather than narrowly seek candidates credentialed to meet century-old licensure restrictions. It would allow schools to explore how they might strengthen neighborly ties while better tapping the rich experiences and skills of communities rife with musicians, mechanics, and mentors. And it would allow those who disagree with ed-school orthodoxy to enter the teaching profession without being subjected to a gauntlet of intimidation and reeducation. All very good things.