Like many states, California grapples with the persistent challenge of recruiting and retaining a high-quality, diverse teacher workforce. Nationally, teacher shortages remain widespread, and in some cases are growing (Nguyen et al., 2024; Tan et al., 2024), while enrollment in teacher education programs has declined on average (Wilson & Kelley, 2022). Despite efforts to diversify the K-12 teacher workforce, the teaching profession today remains predominantly White and female (Gist & Bristol, 2022), underscoring structural barriers to equitable access into the teaching profession. In particular, testing requirements and broader systemic inequities in educational access and opportunity across the P-20 pipeline continue to constrain efforts to diversify the K-12 teacher workforce (Bardelli et al., 2024; Carver-Thomas, 2018; Nettles et al., 2011). At the same time, broader shifts in the labor market may further shape who enters and persists in the teaching profession.
Consistent with these broader national trends, California faces shortages of fully credentialed teachers, particularly in math, science, special education, and bilingual education (Carver-Thomas et al., 2024). When schools have shortages of fully credentialed teachers, they may be forced to increase class sizes, cut course offerings, and assign teachers to cover courses outside of their field (Podolsky & Sutcher, 2016). At the same time, California diverges from national trends in important ways. For example, California has seen increasing numbers of individuals completing teacher education programs after a dip in 2022 (Carver-Thomas et al., 2024). Still, the number of teacher education program completers is still much lower than its peak in 2004-05 (Leung-Gagné et al., 2026). Following significant state investments in diversifying the teacher pipeline, the teacher workforce in California has also become more racially/ethnically diverse in recent years (Leung-Gagné et al., 2026). These conditions underscore both the progress California has made to improve the teacher workforce, and the enduring challenges that remain. Taken together, these dynamics raise pressing questions about the capacity of existing systems and policies in the state to strengthen the teaching profession.
How teachers are prepared, credentialed, and ultimately distributed across the state’s education system has profound implications for students’ equitable access to high-quality instruction. Underqualified teachers are both less effective (Goldhaber & Brewer, 2000) and are more likely to leave teaching (Deneault & Riehl, 2025), yet these teachers disproportionately teach students of color and students from low-income families in California (Lafortune et al., 2025). Addressing the statewide systems that oversee policy for preparing and credentialing the state’s teachers is a critical lever for driving improvement in the education system at large, as high-quality teachers are one of the most important school-based factors for supporting student achievement (Chetty et al., 2014; Rivkin et al., 2005). Balancing quality and access in entry to the teaching profession therefore remains one of the most enduring challenges facing the field at large (Grossman et al., 2026), and California in particular. All states establish credentialing requirements for teachers intended to safeguard quality while ensuring access; however, the systems and requirements for credentialing vary widely across states (Ronfeldt et al., 2026). Given this variation, it is critical to understand the capacity of California to prepare and credential new teachers into the profession.
This report examines what makes California’s credentialing system unique and how its structures present particular challenges, and opportunities, for driving improvements in the teaching profession. Our central aim is to understand the extent to which the current teacher credentialing system is designed to support coherence in the preparation and credentialing of new teachers. More specifically, in this report, we seek to address the following research questions:
- Is the system well-designed to prepare teachers appropriately by content area, grade-level, and student population served?
- What are some of the ways in which the current system may create challenges for those interested in entering the profession?
- How could we reimagine pathways into teaching that address those challenges?
To answer these questions, we conducted a scan of the landscape of teacher credentialing in California, relying on public policy artifacts, existing research, and interviews with key stakeholders across the state’s policy and higher education system. In particular, we drew on public artifacts from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, state legislation related to teacher credentialing, and prior research and news articles on teacher credentialing in California. We also conducted interviews with a range of key stakeholders in the state, including state policy leaders, researchers, faculty members, and practitioners with expertise on the state’s credentialing system. The findings represent our syntheses of these artifacts, research, and interviews.
We begin by providing an overview of the current system of teacher credentialing in California, before discussing the challenges of the current system, and the long-term and short-term opportunities to address those challenges.
