The Usage and Impact of Act 1240 Teacher Licensure Waivers in Arkansas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Act 1240 of 2015 allows Arkansas school districts to petition for waivers allowing for the employment of teachers who are not licensed under the standard procedures of the state. Since the program’s inception in the 2016-17 school year, the number of teachers employed under Act 1240 waivers has increased, with the Arkansas Department of Education reporting 836 teachers hired using Act 1240 waivers in 69 districts during the 2021-22 school year. This represents approximately one quarter of the districts within the state, but only approximately 2 percent of the nearly 40,000 teachers employed last year. Using publicly available data from the Arkansas Department of Education, we found that Act 1240 waivers are used by districts across Arkansas, but are most prevalent in high-poverty districts in the southeast region of the state. After statistically controlling for school poverty and size, students in schools that hire Act 1240 teachers are less likely to meet grade-level expectations on the state assessments in literacy and mathematics compared to students in schools that do not. Differences in average student academic growth scores between schools with and without Act 1240 teachers, however, are insignificant. This suggests that the schools that utilize Act 1240 waivers may have underlying differences that contribute to lower student achievement than evidenced by similar schools, but that the introduction of teachers working under Act 1240 waivers does not, on average, significantly impact the academic growth of students within waiver schools. We found, however, that the districts with low usage of Act 1240 teacher licensure exceptions demonstrated growth and achievement trends consistent with districts that did not employ any waiver teachers. In contrast, districts where more than 25 percent of teachers were employed under an Act 1240 waiver in 2021-22 had lower levels of student achievement and growth in 2015-16 - the year before the waiver program began. Moreover, these districts experienced greater declines in students' achievement and growth than districts with no waiver use. This suggests that heavy Act 1240 waiver usage is driven by pre-existing structural changes facing specific, struggling districts, and should be considered as a signal of a need for greater all-around support for these districts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".