Disparate Impacts of Teacher Certification Exams / Christa Deneault, Evan Riehl, Jian Zou.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Deneault, Christa.

Contributor:

Riehl, Evan.

Zou, Jian.

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w34860.

NBER working paper series no. w34860

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2026.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

February 2026.

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