Missouri educators will no longer need a 3.0 grade-point average in their subject area to teach in public schools beginning in July, the State Board of Education unanimously voted Tuesday.
The threshold to be qualified to teach in the state is now a 2.5 grade-point average in the teacher’s content area. The only exception will be special-education teachers, who will still be required to meet the 3.0 mark.
Officials with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Educations say the change is intended to increase the number of certificated teachers coming into public schools. Commissioner of Education Karla Eslinger said in a statement that the change would remove “unnecessary barriers to the teaching profession.”
“There is no evidence tying a particular GPA in the content area to more effective teaching,” Daryl Fridley, the department’s education preparation coordinator, told the board on Tuesday. “Most of the non-teaching professional options in sciences, math and history do not require such a high GPA.”
A 3.0 GPA requirement most impacts teachers in STEM subjects, he said. When the department looked at teacher candidates who met other requirements but didn’t meet the GPA standard, nearly a quarter of those disqualified were in STEM.
Teacher candidates still must pass a performance assessment, with a test of subject knowledge, to be certified. Of those who didn’t meet the GPA requirements, 90% passed the performance assessment, Fridley said.
The department hopes the new requirements will bring more teachers into the profession. Currently, almost 44% of first-year teachers are certified in Missouri. Over a quarter are serving as a substitute teacher, 6% have no certification and the rest have alternative certifications.
“Discussions about this issue often include the question, ‘Isn’t this a case of lowering standards?’” Fridley said. “We maintain that with a third of the state’s first year teachers having no more than a substitute teacher certificate and some with even less, any action that leads to a higher proportion of first-year teachers completing the preparation program is actually a net gain for the overall quality of teachers.”
In the midst of low teacher retention rates and poor recruitment, the change is welcome, the department reiterated.
“Both quantity and quality of teachers are really important to the learning of students,” Paul Katnik, assistant commissioner of educator quality, said during Tuesday’s meeting.
The department reiterated that it doesn’t believe the lower GPA threshold will affect teacher quality.
A 2019 study out of Texas showed that there was no improvement in achievement outcomes between a 2.5 GPA and 2.75 GPA requirement. Increasing the threshold to 3.0 excluded 44% of education students and brought a small increase on teachers’ evaluations. The study concludes a “higher GPA criteria would also have minimal impact on the quality of our nation’s teachers.”
Carol Hallquist, vice president of the State Board of Education, said she was initially wary of lowering the GPA standard but is now “totally supportive.”
“When I reached out to principals and people who are in teacher preparation programs, they said there was no correlation and were very supportive,” she said. “They also said that you have to pass licensing tests, and that is really what we want to look at.”
Doug Hayter, executive director of the Missouri Association of School Administrators, told The Independent he has been speaking to the department about the GPA requirements and is optimistic.
“There is a balance where we need to have requirements that mean something, but the research that they have seems to indicate that this change would not have a substantial impact on teacher effectiveness,” he said. “As long as that’s the case, we want to give educators as many options as possible in a world where there’s still a lot of open positions in regard to public education.”
Further helping open doors for new teachers is the reinstatement of a general science certification for high school educators. The department has required science teachers to specialize in an area, like chemistry or biology, but now will bring back a certification for generalists with a broader knowledge base.
“The reinstatement of this general science certificate will create opportunities for more students to choose to be science teachers, not by lowering standards, but instead by creating a path in which the standards are more aligned with the needs of schools,” Fridley said.
Hayter expects the change to impact districts statewide, saying that “every little bit helps” to recruit teachers.
“This is one small part of a bigger picture of making sure that we have very effective educators in our classrooms moving forward,” he said.
The “bigger picture,” Hayter said, includes boosting teacher pay and making schools welcoming for educators.
