The predictable, but unpredictably personal, politics of teacher licensure

The debates about teacher licensure have long reflected a grace, decorum, and rhetorical nu-ance more appropriate to the final weeks of a partisan political contest than to a substantive policy debate. Perplexingly, given the utterly unexceptional nature of the politics of the issue, the debate has turned into an often venomous dispute focused largely on the intricacies of data interpretation. The clash between those who would defend licensure and toughen the preparation require-ments that it entails (the “professionalizers ” in their preferred parlance) and those who would downsize much of the accreditation and licensure apparatus (“commonsense reform-ers ” in my preferred argot) has often entailed policy disputes taking on a personal dimension. This may, in part, be due to the reality that there is relatively little reliable information on the value or effects of teacher licensure and prepa-ration. In what may be the most disinterested survey of the research on teacher preparation and licensure, the Education Commission of the States found in 2003 that just 92 out of more than 500 studies met the minimal professional stan-dard of basing conclusions on “systematic observation rather than... opinion ” and that the evidence on seven of eight key questions examined was nonexistent or inconclusive (Allen, 2003, p. 3).1 My introduction to the personal nature of the discourse came in 2001 when, as an assistant professor of education at the University of Vir-ginia, I wrote a policy brief titled Tear Down Thi