Disparate Impacts of Teacher Certification Exams

Christa Deneault, Evan Riehl and Jian Zou

No 34860, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We use Texas administrative data to assess the long-standing claim that teacher certification exams discriminate against underrepresented minority (URM) candidates. In a regression discontinuity design, we find that failing a certification exam delays entry into teaching and costs the average candidate $10,000 in forgone earnings. These costs fall disproportionately on URM candidates both because they are more likely to fail and because their earnings losses from failing are 50 percent larger on average. To examine whether these disparities are justified by racial/ethnic differences in teaching quality, we develop a new measure of disparate impact and estimate it using a policy change that increased the difficulty of Texas' elementary certification exam. The harder exam reduced the URM share of new teachers but had no significant benefits for teaching quality or student achievement. Taken together, our findings show that certification exams have a disparate impact in the sense that they impose much larger economic costs on URM teaching candidates than on white candidates with similar potential teaching quality.

JEL-codes: I24 J44 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lma, nep-mid and nep-uep
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