Occupational licensing in US public schools: Nationwide implementation of Teacher Performance Assessment

Abstract

Occupational licensing potentially benefits consumers by requiring workers minimum training but at the cost of reducing supply. We study this trade-off by evaluating the recent controversial roll-out of the educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) that raises the entry requirement of public school teachers – the largest licensed profession in the US. Leveraging the quasi-experimental setting of different adoption timing by states, we analyze multiple data sources containing a national sample of prospective teachers and students of new teachers. With extensive controls of concurrent policies, we find that the edTPA reduced prospective teachers in undergraduate programs and less selective and minority-concentrated universities. Testing various specifications and sample criteria, we do not find evidence that the new license standard increased student test scores.