The Cognitive Barrier to Teaching
Education Realist: no more dewey-eyed dreamers
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The Cognitive Barrier to Teaching<br>It ain't the degree work.
Education Realist<br>Jul 24, 2026
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When people want to mock ed schools and the low IQ of the students within them, they often go straight to the coursework. Millions of pages mocking absurd ed school projects have been offered up as evidence that lordy, America’s teachers are none too bright.<br>Do not confuse my disdain for those mockers as defense of ed school courses. I myself did my best to avoid ed school and those projects. I failed. Teacher credentials are a pay to play activity. We all bulldoze through the bullshit irrespective of our views.<br>However, those courses have nothing to do with demonstrating teacher intellect.<br>Tests, not coursework, define the entry barrier to teaching1. The licensure tests never get mentioned in the “teachers are stupid” corner. Even in more respectable journalistic outputs, the tests get a single sentence halfway through the article in the polite wailings of low teacher ability. I’d wager that a survey of every single American who holds the uncritical opinion that teachers are of uniformly low intellect would reveal a full 80% of them don’t know about credential tests. The other 20% have heard of credential test, but point that that the pass rate is 100% so the tests are a joke. All teachers pass the tests, so the tests are easy.<br>They’ve got it backwards. People who don’t pass the tests don’t become teachers.<br>Again: The cognitive barrier to teaching is the subject matter licensure test. 2<br>The licensure tests (also commonly described as credential tests or competency tests), play two roles that are often ignored in teacher policy issues.<br>First, the tests are a significant obstacle for would-be black and Hispanic teachers (see the footnotes for links to further discussion). Most think pieces on the dearth of “minority” teachers avoid mentioning that close to 60% of blacks and half of Hispanics fail the elementary school credential tests. Fewer blacks and Hispanics even attempt to become high school academic teachers, so the fail rates are slightly lower, but still in the 30-40% range.<br>Here are Texas pass rates by test but not by race, which would do more to explain why there are far fewer black and Hispanic high school teachers, and why TEA has been dishing out emergency credentials and handling massive cheating scandals.3<br>Illinois pass rates do publish by test and race. Of the 601 black teacher candidates who took the elementary school test in 2022-24, 59% passed. Hispanics do much better at 89% of the 1629 who took it. Middle school science teachers sound pretty good with blacks at 61% and Hispanics at 85% until you see that just 75 and 110 in each category took the test in two years. High school math? 27 out of 81 for blacks, 129 out of 204 for Hispanics, and 960 out of 1,177 for whites. Illinois does have a middle school math test that passed 94 out of 135 blacks, 211 out of 237 Hispanics, and 1,292 out of 1,353 whites.<br>Similar pass rates are found in every state. And that, readers, is a major reason why most American teachers are white. 4<br>Please, let these pass rates guide you to grasping an essential point: yes, ed schools focus pervasively on DEI. But they can’t commit affirmative action. In the 90s, ed schools would graduate candidates without requiring the test and those teachers could get an “emergency credential” that was in fact permanent—until NCLB changed the law, ending emergency credentials, requiring a licensure test, and didn’t grant any grandfathering. 5<br>The institution of the required credential tests and published pass rates severely constricts education schools. They can’t credential underrepresented minorities using a different standard. Candidates have to pass the licensure tests to get the credentials. And the fail rates reveal they represent a significant cognitive challenge that are keeping out thousands of low achievers nationwide.<br>The institution of credential tests and closed loopholes ended a number of teaching careers, created a much-noticed dearth of black and Hispanic teachers, and led to three separate credential test cheating rings (one of which was just uncovered last year).6<br>To the extent credential tests are mentioned in public conversation (a rare occurrence), their impact on black and Hispanic teacher pools are the sole reason.<br>But there’s another important but unmentioned role: the tests keep a non-trivial percentage of whites and Asians out, too. This fact isn’t explored or discussed because the inevitable conclusion is that many college students and graduates who would like to become teachers and pay non-trivial sums to take the credentials tests can not, in fact, pass those tests.<br>How difficult are the tests? Elementary school teachers have to pass a knowledge test at about the tenth grade high school level—algebra1, fractions, ratios, grammar, reading comp....