At an Oklahoma State Board of Education meeting last November, member Becky Carson called on the board to shift its priorities to filling classrooms with properly trained, fully certified teachers.
“If we expect to move out of 50th, we have to start focusing on getting highly qualified educators in the front of classrooms,” Carson said.
Despite shows of support from Carson, other policymakers and programs such as Inspired to Teach, the number of people completing education preparation programs continues to decline. Even when people do attend these educator programs, only a few institutions in Oklahoma boast consistently high certification exam pass rates.
Jessica Newman attended community college before transferring to the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa to complete her educator preparation program. Even though she dedicated her time and money to the program, she had to retake one of the teaching exams three times.
She was student teaching while studying for the exam, which she said made it harder to prepare. When she got to the test, she said the format just didn’t make sense to her. She said it felt unrealistic to how she had seen classroom preparation and instruction proceed in her time as an undergraduate.
Two years after graduating, Newman took a new version of the test and passed on her first try. Because she didn’t pass the exam the first time, she couldn’t be employed at a school district as a teacher. Instead, she took a paraprofessional position at Union Public Schools.
Even taking the traditional path, many students struggle to complete the next step to the classroom, at some colleges more than others. At 12 of the state's 35 teacher preparation institutions, the certification pass rate was 75% or less in 2024-25, according to data from the Oklahoma Department of Educational Quality and Accountability.
The range is wide. Oklahoma Christian had a 100% pass rate; Oklahoma Baptist, 88.3%; and Oklahoma State, 85.4%. At the other end of the spectrum, Randall University posted a pass rate of just 36.4% and Langston University’s was just 15.2%,
That presents a slew of student challenges: paying for retakes, possibly having to apply for emergency certification and waiting weeks to hear back about results.
Eleven schools had an unreportable score due to student privacy stipulations. The testing pool was so small that the data could reveal who the test takers were, so the score wasn’t reported. More than 5,200 tests were taken without the test taker selecting an affiliated school. Those tests were passed only 57.7% of the time.
Tests taken at Langston University were passed 15.2% of the time, with a total of 33 tests. So it’s possible 28 hopeful teachers didn’t pass.
Although more than 2,000 emergency certifications were approved on August 20, the teacher shortage persists.
According to the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, certification examination performance is just one component of Oklahoma’s educator preparation accountability system, but is not the sole measure of their quality. Institutions are also evaluated through state accreditation and program review, annual outcome reporting, assessment of candidate performance, clinical preparation, and continuous improvement processes.
“Preparing aspiring teachers to pass can strengthen the teacher pipeline,” National Council on Teacher Quality President Heather Peske said. “The exams serve as a guardrail for teacher quality. Knowing this data can strengthen that pipeline.”
What the data really says
Peske said the data creates more questions than it answers. The National Council on Teacher Quality is a non-profit dedicated to ensuring every child has an effective teacher by conducting research and working with states, districts and teacher prep programs.
“All you really know is that one has higher pass rates than another, but you don’t know where students are doing well or struggling,” Peske said.
There is another data table that shows the pass rate for each test, but it’s missing the institution the test takers were from. Having that detail could indicate which section future teachers at prep programs struggle with most, so institutions can be held accountable.
Eric Jones, director of education quality at the agency, said that level of granular detail is hard to publish. It can be requested by lawmakers but is not made public.
If the agency published the pass rate for every test by institution in a given year, the dataset would be massive and might violate student privacy guidelines.
In some cases, that pool is already small. Randall University had 11 test-takers pass, a 36.4% success rate in 2025. Oklahoma State University reported 411 test-takers with an average pass rate of 85.4%.
Just one low score among a smaller group of test-takers can significantly change the pass rate. The aggregate pass rate listed in the report also combines the pass rates of all tests taken at an institution in a given year.
In other words, if 15 people are listed as having taken tests at a university, that could be 15 individual test-takers taking different tests, or it could be five people retaking their tests three times.
The University of Central Oklahoma is one of the universities that had a pass rate below 75% last year. Once in the field, however, graduates are shown to score highly on Teacher and Leader Effectiveness, according to Director of Educator Preparation Kimberly Pennington.
She said that, just as tests for K-12 students aren’t a perfect representation of their abilities, the teacher certification exam is just a snapshot from one day. Other educator preparation program directors said test results may be highly affected by test anxiety.
Pennington also said the decline in pass rate at the university might be because of incorrect rosters on Pearson’s end. Pearson is the company contracted by the state to administer the Oklahoma Subject Area Tests and the Praxis exam. Those two tests measure candidate preparedness in subject areas.
Pennington said she has sent corrected rosters detailing which students are from her educator preparation program, but the data will still be published, including students who were not in the program, which may significantly decrease the pass rate.
She said some of those test-takers may be people who completed another undergraduate degree at the university and then, after graduating, began the alternate certification path. They then mark the University of Central Oklahoma as their institutional affiliation despite not being in the educator program.
Officials at the Oklahoma Department of Educational Quality and Accountability said that is a problem they and Pearson have been made aware of. In this year’s report, programs will be able to mark a candidate as a traditional route, an alternative route, or not affiliated with their program at all, instead of a single eligible or ineligible option.
The aggregation of scores and who is taking them provides little insight into how well institutions are preparing their students to pass core curriculum exams.
Lawmakers such as Rep. Dick Lowe, R-Amber, said mastery in core subjects is vital.
“Having qualified people in the classroom is what we should be working toward,” Lowe said. “It makes sense to have people who have worked on core subjects to teach them to our kids.”
He recalled how COVID-19 put schools in a tough spot and said Oklahoma schools would have had dark classrooms if it weren’t for the emergency-certified teachers who stepped up. Since the pandemic ended, children's reading scores have dropped and remained low.
“We have a lot of great teachers; I’d love to see them be certified and knowing everything they possibly can when they enter the classroom,” Lowe said.
What can be done
In Utah, pass rates increased by 30% after the state started publishing the first-time pass rates for each program on the Foundations of Reading test, Peske said.
Schools in Utah compared student achievement and failure across their testing cohorts and collaborated on ways to improve when that data became publicly available.
Peske said it is the responsibility of the preparation institution to ensure its students pass their exams.
“People go to these programs, paying a lot of money and spending the time thinking they’ll leave this program, get their license and get in the classroom,” Peske said.
To attend Oklahoma Christian University for a year, students can expect to spend about $39,000. In comparison, the average cost for getting an undergraduate degree at a regional school in Oklahoma is $17,557. Then, when it’s time to take their exams, students will have to pay another few hundred dollars to complete them all. If they fail a section, they’ll have to pay again to retake it.
Allison Cassady said before students hit that expensive failure, she and her team try to find out where students might be struggling. She is the education department chair at Oklahoma Christian University, which had a 100% pass rate in 2025.
Other high-scoring universities such as Oklahoma Baptist, Oklahoma State and East Central all have similar approaches to ensuring their students pass: they employ significant tutoring and support for students as they prepare for their exams.
Effects of a difficult test
Jones said that tests measure readiness but do not contribute to the teacher shortage.
Instead, education preparation institutions may need to be doing a better job of preparing their students. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes people who have gone through teacher preparation institutions have to become emergency-certified either because their scores haven’t come back or because they haven’t yet taken both of the tests.
In the first four pages of recent emergency-certified teachers from the August State Board of Education meeting, 10 people are listed as holding a degree in education and still requesting emergency certification. There are 25 more pages of names.
Crystal Barber, executive director of human resources at Broken Arrow Public Schools, said the district recently had to request an emergency certification for a teacher who completed traditional schooling.
The teacher’s exam results hadn’t been posted, and the school year was quickly approaching. They requested emergency certification for the teacher because they didn’t want to be flagged by the state board for having an uncertified teacher in the classroom.
Another reason traditionally educated teachers might have emergency certification is that they want to teach grades or subjects not included in their original degree, as with Alexis Hatter, who teaches at Atoka Public Schools.
Hatter is traditionally certified to teach students up until fifth grade. She plans to take her certification exam in November to broaden her teaching scope.
According to Jacqueline Gover-Robb and Sherrie Redding, it’s really easy to put off taking the certification exam once emergency certified. The pair work for Osage Interlocal Cooperative as the director of teaching and learning and an instructional coach.
They mostly help emergency-certified teachers pass certification exams and often receive frantic calls from them as their certification deadline approaches. But they aren’t a magic bullet.
Emergency, alternate and adjunct certification isn’t a panacea for the teacher shortage in Oklahoma either.
“That might be putting bodies in the classroom, but that doesn’t mean students are receiving the same quality of education they might from someone who has had multiple years of education and fieldwork experience,” said Sen. Carri Hicks, D-Oklahoma City.
Statistically, emergency and alternatively certified teachers are less likely to remain in the classroom long term, contributing to rapid turnover that can negatively affect student learning outcomes.
According to Gover-Robb and Redding, in rural areas there are so few people that school districts are doing what they can with what they have.
“It’s hard, in rural areas, to coax people to you,” Anadarko Public Schools Superintendent Danny Pittman said.
Low-paying jobs, increased discipline problems in the classroom, and negative public discourse about teachers are just a few of the reasons given by policymakers and educators for why it might be so difficult to get teachers to stay in the classroom. But getting qualified, well-trained teachers in the room in the first place is still a struggle.
“We don’t know how teacher prep institutions are doing in Oklahoma because we don't have the data to answer that question,” Peske said.
Officials at the Oklahoma Department of Educational Quality and Accountability are developing a more detailed data dashboard. In the meantime, they don’t want more legislation, Jones said. They just need time.
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
