Teacher Quality
Data on teacher certification and experience

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Teacher Quality in the South: Click the options below to explore the data.

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Regional Highlights

Measuring teacher quality is difficult, so states rely on proxy measures.

More than one-third (37.3%) of teachers in the South were inexperienced, out-of-field or uncertified in 2022-23, a 4% increase from the previous school year, and a 9% increase from the 2019-20 school year.

Teachers in the SREB region are nearly 2.7x more likely to have attained National Board Certification than teachers elsewhere in the United States.

More than 1 in 3 teachers in the South are inexperienced, teaching out-of-field or uncertified.

Over the last 4 school years (from 2019-20 to 2022-23), the percent of teachers who are inexperienced has increased by 2.6 percent, out-of-field by 2.5 percent, and uncertified by 3.9 percent.

12.3 is the average years of teaching experience among teachers in the SREB region.

Of the nation's 270,513 underqualified teachers in 2023, a majority (55.7%) worked in the South.

A greater percentage of teachers in the South achieve National Board Certification than in the rest of the U.S. — on average, 8 percent within the SREB region, compared to 3 percent in the rest of the U.S.

 

 

Data by State

 

 

 

 

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