A growing number of Wisconsin teachers hold emergency licenses, reflecting staffing needs and a greater reliance on non-traditional routes into the classroom. This trend is seen across districts but is more prevalent in small or urban districts, certain subject areas, and cases of individuals with less experience. As school leaders increasingly rely on emergency license holders, they may want to consider what support they offer them.
https://public.tableau.com/views/EmegencyLicensesUpdate/Fig1?:showVizHome=no&:embed=trueAmid a shifting educator workforce landscape that included turnover falling from 2023 highs, the number of emergency teaching licenses issued by the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) kept rising to 3,832 in the 2023-24 academic year (referred to as 2024). Though this represents only a 0.9% increase over the previous year, the number of emergency licenses has still risen 19.9% since 2022 – the last time the Forum reported on emergency teaching licenses (see Figure 1). The number of license holders followed a similar trend, growing marginally in 2024 after a large increase in 2023.
The jump was not driven by a few subject areas but rather was the accumulated growth across many, especially smaller, areas. For example, from 2022 to 2024, emergency licenses in Spanish grew by 49% to 73 in total, and those in physical education grew by 96% to 90 licenses. Meanwhile, the three subject areas containing the most emergency licenses – cross-categorical special education, regular education, and elementary/middle education – only grew by a collective 10.9% over the same time period.
As the use of emergency licenses continues to expand in Wisconsin schools, this report examines the types of individuals and districts that are more likely to use emergency licenses and what this says about the state of education.
“Emergency” Licenses?
https://public.tableau.com/views/EmegencyLicensesUpdate/Box?:showVizHome=no&:embed=trueIn the most typical route into Wisconsin’s educator workforce, an incoming teacher earns a bachelor’s degree in education, meets the state’s licensing requirements, and begins teaching with a Tier II Provisional License. Teachers who do not follow the traditional route, however, begin their teaching careers with Tier I Licenses with Stipulations as shown in this DPI graphic. In order to obtain a Tier I license, a person only needs to have earned a bachelor’s degree and passed a background check. (Some content areas require the degree to be in specific related fields.) Educators with Tier I licenses are allowed to work in schools for one or three years while they work towards a Tier II license. In addition to new teachers on non-traditional tracks, DPI also issues Tier I licenses to teachers who are licensed in states other than Wisconsin or who want to teach classes or grade levels outside of their current licenses.
Informally, Tier I licenses are often called emergency licenses or teaching permits. In this brief, we use the term “emergency license” to reflect the public’s broad understanding. In some respects, the term may now be misleading, if individuals use them less for isolated emergency situations and more as established entry methods into education careers. For example, emergency licenses are common for second- career educators, who already have college degrees. Emergency licenses allow them to earn wages and gain experience while working towards full licensure.
For some districts, however, the situation may still seem dire, as they often turn to educators with emergency licenses when the traditional pipeline – schools of education – does not yield enough candidates in their needed areas. They might recruit brand-new teachers with no formal education training. Alternatively, a district may ask experienced or retired teachers, or school support staff, to take on roles for which they are not yet licensed. These may be temporary arrangements to fill a gap as the district seeks a permanent employee with appropriate licensure. Otherwise, the educator may eventually fulfill the needed licensing requirements to take on the new role permanently.
A growing share of the workforce
To chart the growth in emergency licenses, we compared DPI’s 2024 emergency license list to the agency’s Public All Staff Report, which lists all positions in Wisconsin’s traditional public and charter schools, including teachers, administrators, and support staff.
In 2024, Wisconsin public schools reported 119,188 positions that required DPI licenses. Individuals with emergency licenses held 3.8% of those positions. This is a substantial change from five years prior, in 2019, when 2.6% of the 120,384 licensed positions were held by someone with an emergency license.
https://public.tableau.com/views/EmegencyLicensesUpdate/Fig2?:showVizHome=no&:embed=trueIn addition, the 2024 All Staff Report listed 95,501 unique individuals holding licenses, many with multiple positions. Among these, 3.6% had emergency licenses – an increase from 2019, when 2.5% of 96,261 licensed educators taught with emergency licenses.
The growth was not distributed evenly across the workforce. In 2024, 20.9% of the 7,658 teachers with less than three years of experience had emergency licenses. That was a sharp uptick from 2019’s 16.5% (see Figure 2). The share of emergency license holders among individuals with three to five years’ experience and those with greater than five years grew by less: 2.1 and 0.5 points respectively.
Overall, more than one fifth of novice teachers held emergency licenses in 2024, compared to 7.4% of individuals with three to five years’ experience and only 1.7% of those with more than five years’ experience. However, the larger number of people in the latter categories means that a similar number of emergency licenses were used by experienced teachers to branch into new roles as by a large and growing proportion of novice teachers coming into the teaching profession via a non-traditional route.
use of emergency licenses varies
In 2024, the statewide rate for emergency licenses among educators was 3.6%. This rate was not uniform across districts, however, and varied by geographic location, the number of students served, locale type, and subject area.
https://public.tableau.com/views/TeacherLicenseFocus-districts/Fig3?:showVizHome=no&:embed=trueTo analyze the geographic distribution, we used the state’s 12 cooperative educational service agency (CESA) regions. Districts in southern Wisconsin, located in CESAs 1, 2, and 3, had an above-average rate of emergency licensing in 2024: 3.8% in all three. Combined, these three CESAs contained about half of the state’s educators (47.6%) and emergency teaching licenses (50.7%). Districts in northern Wisconsin – CESAs 8, 9, and 12 – contained a small proportion of the state’s educators (8.6%) but a disproportionately larger share of emergency licenses (11.8%). The 2024 emergency license rates for CESAs 8, 9, and 12 were 4.8%, 4.8%, and 5.1%, respectively. Figure 3 illustrates these broad geographic trends, although note that the rates displayed represent the share of licensed positions filled with emergency licenses rather than the share of licensed individuals holding emergency licenses.
Of all the district types examined, small districts, defined as those with fewer than 500 students, had the highest average emergency licensure rate at 5.4%. In part, this may reflect a desire to offer a wide array of course offerings even with a small workforce. Small districts may also be less likely to have established relationships with traditional education preparation programs, as documented by Wisconsin Center for Education Research reports on rural districts. (The vast majority of Wisconsin’s small districts – 79.0% – are rural.) Small districts also experience high teacher, principal, and superintendent turnover, which may be due to compensation challenges, personal or professional isolation, and more limited opportunities for growth or partnerships. All of these factors could contribute to higher emergency licensing rates.
Districts with 500 to 1,000 students had an average rate of 3.3% in 2024; districts with 1,000 to 3,000 students averaged 2.9%. For the largest districts, those serving more than 3,000 students, rates were just above the statewide average at 3.7%.
https://public.tableau.com/views/TeacherLicenseFocus-districts/Fig4?:showVizHome=no&:embed=trueAs one might therefore predict, the five largest districts in Wisconsin all had districtwide rates above the state average, as shown in Figure 4. Within these districts, however, use of emergency licenses varied greatly between schools, with some schools’ use of them actually falling below the state average.
All five of these districts are in urban locales, as defined by the National Center for Educational Statistics. Wisconsin districts in urban locales had a combined emergency licensing rate of 5.1%, well above the state rate. In contrast, districts in suburban and town settings had average rates of 2.3% and 3.0%, respectively. Even rural districts, which one might expect to have above-average rates given the high proportion of small districts that are also rural districts, were instead below average, with 3.3% of licensed individuals using an emergency license in 2024.
Finally, emergency licensure rates also differed by subject area. The most common emergency license in 2024 was for cross-categorical special education. That year, 22.0% of emergency licenses were in cross-categorical special education, despite those positions accounting for only 6.2% of all licensed education positions. Furthermore, 9.9% of the individuals in those positions held emergency licenses, much higher than the state average.
The next two most common emergency licenses were in regular education and elementary/middle education, which comprised 11.3% and 11.2% of licenses issued in 2024, respectively. It is perhaps less surprising for emergency licensure to concentrate in these areas, because both are licenses commonly used in the primary grades, and “elementary classroom” is the most common area description by position in the All Staff Report, accounting for 16.6% of records in 2024.
Other notable All Staff Report positions include those affiliated with a bilingual program or an alternative education program. Both had above-average rates of educators with emergency licenses: 22.8% for bilingual positions and 5.2% for alternative education program positions. These high rates suggest that schools may be more likely to stretch bilingual or alternative education staff across multiple subject areas as a result of broad student need or small program size. Each of these programs comprise less than 1% of the state’s educators (although bilingual-bicultural education was the fourth most frequently issued emergency license in 2024) but exemplify the scenarios that make emergency licensure a regular occurrence.
conclusion
Emergency licensure has long been an available tool in districts’ toolkits for filling vacancies and enhancing staffing. The recent growth in emergency licenses suggests that districts increasingly regard it as a necessary rather than optional tool.
For some subject areas, like special education and bilingual education, student needs may be driving the increase. For example, the share and number of both students with disabilities and English Learners has grown in each of the last four years. Districts may also be attempting to expand their course offerings to compete for a declining number of students in an educational landscape rife with different schooling options. Using emergency licenses to broaden the reach of new or existing educators could support that expansion.
The large percentage of novice educators holding emergency licenses points to the most likely contributor to emergency licensure: the diminishing pipeline of K-12 teachers in traditional schools of education. Previous Forum work has described some factors discouraging potential candidates from entering schools of education. In addition, overall enrollment in higher education is down due to demographics and other factors. As districts pursue alternative recruitment methods like emergency licensure, policymakers may wish to evaluate which strategies (traditional and alternative) are most effectively recruiting and also retaining educators, and boost those pathways yielding more and higher quality applicants.
In the meantime, districts that hire more educators who have not gone through traditional four-year programs may need to supply the training and mentoring that these programs traditionally provide. Likewise, the general public should understand that teachers are increasingly less likely to be lifelong career educators who were trained in a school of education, and are more likely second-career educators or other non-traditionally trained individuals, with a wide range of background knowledge and experience to offer.
